• Ad Age, Monday, November 23, 2009 10:42 AM

During a conclave called 2020Vision that it held in Atlanta last week -- its first such summit since 1998 -- Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent admitted that the company had lost its way for a spell as it focused on the "dashboard" and ignored what was going on "outside of our windshield."

But, as with all admissions of that sort, Kent bore optimistic tidings touching on new products, pricing, targeting, marketing and media approaches. Underlying all of them was the theme of putting the consumer front and center, Natalie Zmuda reports. The end game is that Coke plans to more than double the numbers of servings of its products -- water, soft-drinks, juices and the like -- consumed per day to more than 3 billion by 2020.

"People need to be constantly entertained now, [it's an] ADD economy," says chief marketing and commercial officer Joe Tripodi. "We're changing fundamentally from being TV commercial producers to content developers." Another major theme was scaling globally while retaining local relevance. Wendy Clark, senior vp-integrated marketing, estimates that Coke will save $45 million by using a single FIFA campaign in more than 100 markets next year.

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