Wieden + Kennedy’s plan B spur-of-the-moment Coke ad

The foundations of so many great ads are wonderful stories told well. Wonderful stories within the ad, told well. Wieden + Kennedy’s story for Coke happened outside the ad.

Its story is that the Coca-Cola ad shoot with 22 year old pro-golfer, Jordan Spieth (the two-time major champion that Coke sponsors), to coincide with the US Open was rained out. It was meant to be filmed outdoors but torrential rain messed with the plans (and caused two rain delays on day 1 of the Open).

So the agency and RSA Films director, Terence Neale, did some on-the-spot creative thinking. They wrote a new storyline in which Spieth performs a number of trick shots using whatever was close at hand as impromptu holes – ostensibly to pass the time – and this was filmed inside Spieth’s trailer.

Of course, there’s a tailpiece…apparently, as soon as the team had committed to the new shoot, the sun came out and the production company had to create the rainy outdoors artificially.

The ad that resulted achieved more than 1 million combined views across Facebook and YouTube within its first two weeks.

Footnote: US golf writer Darren Rovell reported the ad was the creation of Hal Curtis at Wieden and Kennedy, who was also responsible for another hugely successful improvised ad, Tiger Woods juggling a golf ball in a 2000 Nike campaign.

Coca-Cola also released a behind the scenes video of the shoot, which shows that Spieth took just three goes to chip the ball into the ice bucket “hole”.

I wonder if any of the W+K and RSA team who’d spent months getting the original script developed, approved, costed and ready for production were feeling they’d had time robbed from their lives.