Coca-Cola inked another massive deal with WPP: what next?

After the dust settled, the drinks company’s chief marketing officer, Manuel Arroyo, took to LinkedIn to share that it had renewed the contract with WPP to extend the Open X relationship, crediting it with delivering “significant value.” This wasn’t won through a review or protracted pitch process, but because Coca-Cola was committed to continuing the journey it had started.

Speaking with The Drum, Laurent Ezekiel, WPP’s chief growth officer and CEO of Open X, declines to delve into why the North American media was moved or the justifications made by Arroyo. But he does dispel the suggestion that it will be disruptive to the model that was designed to strip out layers of complexity.

“The clue, of course, is in the name: Open X. We believe that ideas can come from anywhere. We’ve created a system that is open to our people in the holding company and partners. And that hasn’t changed from day one of the pitch to today. What we’ve done [over the past four years] has been extremely difficult. You’re dealing with two enormous organizations – 200 brands in 195 markets across nine regions and as many categories – and you’re partnering with an organization that has 100,000 people in over 110 countries,” he says.

“On Publicis, we welcome partners. We work with them.”

Ezekiel, himself a former Publicis exec, won’t be drawn on exactly how this has begun to work in practice. It’s one thing working with smaller partners like tech, social, commerce and retail firms, but another to make room for a rival holding company to handle Coca-Cola’s media spend in its largest market. He simply reiterates the “clear processes in place to embrace partners” and that it has worked with Coca-Cola to refine that process to make it “more agile.”

So there it is: yes, it lost the North American brief. But no, that doesn’t change the goalposts. “We are focused on delivering volume and net sales growth for the company in North America, together,” says Ezekiel.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Coca-Cola has extended the contract when you consider that the first two years of the relationship were largely focused on logistics. The first year saw the transfer of media, creative, social and production into WPP, while the second added commerce, data and technology influencer marketing and live experience into the mix. “We said at the beginning that we need to advance those capabilities and models on both sides.”

In between, it has delivered headline-making creative, including the ‘Recycle Me’ campaign, which ran with a series of powerful images that depict the Coca-Cola logo after a can has been crushed during the recycling process. That work landed Coke its first Cannes Lions Grand Prix in 11 years. Then there’s the Athletes’ Code for Powerade, which fought to change contract terms to allow sponsored athletes to pause their partnership agreements to prioritize their mental wellbeing without losing their sponsorship. This was shortlisted for the Titanium at Cannes Lions 2025. Or the most recent ‘Shadows’ campaign that celebrated the brand’s iconic glass bottle through a series of high-impact OOH executions. This year, Ezekiel says over 60 campaigns were submitted into the Cannes Lions awards.

Over that period, Coca-Cola’s business has performed strongly and CEO James Quincey hasn’t been shy in acknowledging the success of its marketing function in quarterly updates. This culminated in Coca-Cola being named ‘Brand of the Year’ at the Cannes Lions Festival in 2024.

“We’ve achieved more than I would have hoped for,” says Ezekiel. “It has been a huge amount of work. It hasn’t always been easy. We now have over 5,000 people across WPP working on the [Coca-Cola] business.”

Aside from creative accomplishments, Ezekiel says the “real bright spot” from the past four years has been the establishment of Studio X. There are now nine studios globally (one for each of Coca-Cola’s major regions) that gather insights and create thousands of assets tailored for local markets. Over the coming years, it’s looking to add more capabilities to the mix.

“There really is a lot of innovative work coming out of the studio. And it’s innovative because it adapts to local needs and local innovation. It’s an essential part of the marketing that we do.”

It has also been important for team integration. In these physical spaces, there will be “hundreds” of people working, some from WPP, some from Coke, and some from other partners. “I’ve asked them, do you think you could work a different way or the way it used to work? And the answer is absolutely not. The concept of working differently in a less integrated and more milestone fashion is alien now.”

How AI is reshaping the new contract

Of course, in the four years since the original contract was inked, there has been one development in the industry that’s upturned everything from how work is made to how it’s distributed: AI.

“The AI narrative [in 2021] was less than 1% of what it is now. There’s no point trying to pretend otherwise. But we’ve genuinely held hands on innovation in the partnership. There were guardrails and incentives in place to drive innovation in tech and data across the model from the beginning of the contract. But months into the partnership, AI became preeminent. We used those processes that we put in place to drive AI innovation and transformation.”

Over that period, Coke has been one of the biggest marketing organizations to go all in on AI, with Ezekiel saying “the majority” of the work it’s done has involved Gen AI in some respect. Take its all-important Christmas campaigns for the past couple of years. In 2023, it used AI to allow consumers to send personalized Christmas cards to loved ones. The following year, its iconic ‘Holidays Are Coming’ campaign was created entirely by AI, including an AI Santa that people could “talk” to people through a QR code on cans and bottles. Despite some backlash, according to System1 analysis, it turned out to be one of Coca-Cola’s most effective ads ever.

So, how is this increasing use of AI across Open X changing the value Coca-Cola attaches to WPP and how it gets paid? The industry has been making noise for some time that suppliers like WPP need to move away from time-and-material and FTE models to a model based on outputs and outcomes.

“Impact over efficiency came up,” says Ezekiel of how it played out in negotiations. “Coca-Cola is the pre-eminent marketer and it’s looking for more impact for its direct marketing expense. And so the discussion was more around impact. In other words, how can AI help gather more pointed insights and, therefore, more impact in the market? It was about how AI could help an idea scale 5,10 or 15% more than it would normally, rather than whether AI could cut your fees by 10%.

“So the conversation was more around what more it’s getting for current spend rather than getting more for less spend. And that’s a really important nuance and the essence of the contract. That sets up a hugely positive tone in the partnership and that’s how we hold hands with them and that’s what we’re focused on. We’re focused on impact.”