Commentary

2007 Online All Star: Carol Kruse

An Entrepreneurial Consumer Champ

Carol Kruse

Vice president of global interactive marketing, The Coca-Cola Company

When Carol Kruse took her first job at Clorox, the move didn’t seem to position her for a career in digital marketing.

But geography — specifically, Clorox’s headquarters in Oakland, Calif. — trumped other considerations. Living so close to Silicon Valley brought Kruse in contact with the Internet in the early 1990s, just as the space was heating up.

With headhunters knocking down her door, Kruse left the Fortune 500 company in 1993 to join a tech-oriented startup. “The lure of the Internet and the Internet boom caught me,” says Kruse. “I decided I was really interested in consumer technology and being more entrepreneurial.”

She worked at a few companies in the next five years and then, with two partners, founded her own shop, RocketCash, a precursor to PayPal.

“I’m very comfortable in the wet cement, starting new things, bringing an organization along to start new areas of marketing,” she says.

Kruse landed at Coca-Cola in 2002, after the company purchased RocketCash. At the time, RocketCash was working with Sprite to run its loyalty program.

Since coming to the company, Kruse has seen its interactive marketing efforts balloon from loyalty programs and experiential Web sites to full-scale online and mobile advertising.

Among other initiatives, she’s in charge of the My Coke Rewards program, a loyalty program that allows consumers to sign up online for rebates and discounts for a variety of items ranging from movie tickets to flip-flops. Kruse also shepherded a campaign for Cherry Coke on MySpace and efforts in Second Life and on YouTube.

But despite the surging online ad efforts, it’s not always easy justifying the dollars spent on the Web,
or proving that online marketing efforts really do have an impact on the bottom line.

“We all intuitively understand that bringing our brands on the Internet, mobile phones and gaming, is important and a great way to enhance our clients’ experiences,” she says. But, she laments, the metrics still leave a lot to be desired.

Of course, offline metrics aren’t any easier. “It’s hard to understand what the impact of an out-of-home billboard is as well,” Kruse says.

Her next hurdle? Figuring out how to bring mobile marketing in the U.S. to the same level as the more mature European market.  The first step, she says, is evaluating consumers’ attitudes. “We need to understand what consumers want, what level of engagement can we have with them on their mobile phones and what level is acceptable to them.”

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