Sergio Zyman and the admen: a marketing maverick puts creativity in its place

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, Feb-March, 2002 by Conrad Fox

Founder and Chairman of Zyman Marketing Group / Former Chief Marketing Officer of Coca-Cola Atlanta, Georgia

Remember the outrageous dot-com advertising from a year ago? The dancing monkeys and live gerbils fired from a cannon? No stunt seemed too low--or too expensive--to get our attention. Those in the know were trumpeting the arrival of a new era in creative advertising.

Yon may remember the ads, but did you buy the products? If the dot-coms leapt into our living rooms like Harpo Marx crashing an embassy lawn party, many are now slinking shamefacedly away. The guests have resumed their genteel chatter, and the only ones laughing are the advertising agencies--all the way to the bank.

It's the kind of scenario that makes Sergio Zyman's blood boil. Zyman is the marketing genius behind The Coca-Cola Company's runaway growth of the 80s and 90s, the former Coke executive either loved or loathed for wresting control of marketing strategy away from the advertising agencies. He is the brash guru who claims to have single-handedly turned marketing into an empirical science. Called one of the three greatest pitchmen ever by Time magazine and--less admiringly--the "Aya-Cola" by some in the advertising industry, Zyman marvels that companies still pour all their marketing dollars into such murky concepts as "image" and "presence." You can fire gerbils at the wall all day, he will tell you, but if it doesn't make people go out and buy your product, you are wasting your time.

"The only purpose of marketing is to sell more things to more people more often tot more money," he writes in his book The End of Marketing As We Know It, a punchy, rough-and-tumble read that chronicles his accumulated experience from over two decades at Coca-Cola and three in marketing. It is an attack on the cabalistic mash-mash of jargon and fuzzy thinking he calls "old-style marketing" and an exhortation to research, plan, and measure results. To the uninitiated, it is a fascinating, sometimes shocking insight into how brands are created and why we buy them. To marketing directors, it is potential gold. That, at least, is Zyman's hope, for it embodies the philosophy that today he imparts to clients as head of Zyman Marketing Group, his Atlanta-based consultancy.

We arrange to meet at his office, an understated environment of bare-to-the-bones chic. Zyman pulls zip ill a Porsche an hour late and breezes into the room with a quick nod to the assembled. Lithe and at ease, he is wearing neat black pants, silver-buckled shoes, and a tennis shirt of a gray that exactly matches his socks. An avid skier, he looks ill, and a coiled energy underlies his conversation. He doesn't want to talk about his own success with the products he has launched--"those are small and uninteresting things and not very significant"--and gets quickly down to what interests him. "I'm tired of advertising campaigns," he says with a deprecating wave of his hand. "They are just tactics. What is important to me is the strategic architecture of a brand."

In fact, Zyman came to Coca-Cola by way of advertising, having worked his way tip from the offices of industry powerhouse McCann-Erickson in his native Mexico City, and he spent ten years on a variety of contracts in Brazil, Guatemala, Japan, and New York. When he landed a job as assistant to the Coke president in 1979, the company was an ailing giant, a manufacturer with no marketing strategy and losing ground to Pepsi. Zyman, by contrast, was brash, dynamic, and results-oriented, and he became involved in an effort In turn the company into a marketing organization with firm control of its brands and a clear idea of where it was going.

Much of that effort is now part of marketing lore, such as the launch of Diet Coke in 1982. Product launches are traditionally careful, controlled introductions into a small market, but Zyman and team threw caution to the wind with a blow-out part), at Radio City Music Hall starring the Rockettes. The product was an over-whelming hit. Zyman was also responsible for nixing some of Coke's most popular commercials in favor of campaigns with a simpler, less erudite message. Anyone over thirty remembers that moving anthem "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke," sung by a group of multiethnic youth on a hillside. "I actually loved the ad," he writes. "It's touching, warm, and a great vehicle to promote unity among the different people of the world.... Did that ad sell any more Coke? Nope."

But perhaps Zyman's most important achievement was to form a professional marketing department at The Coca-Cola Company. With the blessing of legendary Coke President Roberto Goizeuta, he became chief marketing officer in 1993, a previously unheard of position in US corporations. He immediately put himself at odds with the advertising agencies, formerly accustomed to handling marketing strategy, by divvying up the work to many smaller firms and dropping the commission-based payment system. These steps, which many other major advertising contractors have since adopted, raised howls of protest on Madison Avenue, and Zyman admits that, "I'm still in many people's minds simply 'the guy who screwed over the ad agencies.'"