• by OMMA Magazine Writers , August 31, 2007

Carol Kruse, Vice President, Global Interactive Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company

In her current post, Carol Kruse is responsible for developing interactive marketing programs for key global marketing brands and driving the evolution of digital marketing platforms. She brings 15 years of consumer marketing and technology experience to the job, including a stint as group director of interactive marketing at The Coca-Cola Company. Before joining Coca-Cola North America in 2001, Kruse was a brand manager at The Clorox Company and also served as vice president of marketing at Storm Technology, a digital imaging company, and as a co-founder of RocketCash, an online payments and consumer promotion company. She has a B.S. from Pomona College and an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California.

What role does interactive marketing play in Coca-Cola's overall marketing mix?

Coca-Cola strongly believes that the Internet and mobile provide great platforms to connect with consumers. In the United States, digital has played a significant role in the marketing mix. Our My Coke Rewards program is a major communication platform online. It allows participants to enter codes through the Internet or text in on mobile devices to win points that they can spend in different categories including entertainment, sports and music.

Coke has made some high-profile forays into marketing through online social networking sites, notably in connection with the Diet Coke/Mentos experiment on YouTube. (One video showcased the geysers that resulted from dropping Mentos into bottles of soda; another included an ad linking to Coke.com or Coca-Cola.com, announcing a video contest.) How do you approach social media?

With Diet Coke/Mentos, we recognized that our consumers had a passion for Diet Coke and were having fun and all we wanted to do was enhance that experience. Coca-Cola also allowed consumers to create the first video greeting cards online through YouTube last year, so this medium is much more about delivering tools to let people create their own content rather than trying to force your brand on them.

What about other emerging media such as mobile? And how about virtual worlds?

In mobile, we're doing very small marketing tests, only on consumer terms and only on an opt-in basis, because we're very sensitive to privacy issues. We're interested in understanding what consumers want or don't want in this area and looking at it both from a branding and direct marketing perspective.

Our Virtual Thirst pavilion in Second Life is a great example of where we put together an initiative and look for guidance from the community to help us understand this new medium, and test, learn and apply that knowledge. I'm very excited about learning more from consumers, but we're in the middle of the campaign activation on Second Life so we haven't looked at the overall results yet.

What metrics do you look at when it comes to digital marketing?

Measurement is really key, whether around our social media efforts or Web site initiatives. Time spent is a good measure of engagement. So are things like refer-a-friend. We definitely look at brand health measures as well, and each brand has a set of measures of how consumers feel about it. Incremental volume is something else we look at: Are consumers buying more of our products because of involvement in interactive marketing programs? Things like direct purchase data versus claimed data - really trying to tie online behavior to purchase behavior.

If you weren't in your current job, what might you like to do instead?

I'd like to lead adventure travel expeditions around the world. I've traveled extensively for pleasure and really enjoy outdoor adventure activity. I've been sky-diving, scuba-diving and water-skiing. I love to be outside and visit different parts of the world. The professional corollary to that is interactive marketing in a global role.