That review also carves out Korea, where Coke stays with the very same Dentsu that works for everyone else. So Coca-Cola itself already accepts non-exclusive agencies in two of its top markets.
The problem is historical, not strategic.
A lifetime ago, when the ad agency was the client’s marketing department, it knew everything. Monogamy made sense when the firm and its client were so close.
Today, the client conflict argument survives because clients like it. Exclusivity means leverage, and for CMOs, who struggle to exert any influence over their own companies, a rare moment of power when they stipulate, “You can’t work for them.”
Some argue that the same agency serving two competitors will create convergent work, and both brands will lose out. Maybe in the case of creative, but surely not media, where everyone wants the same hive mind and uniform systems running their approach. One of the big attractions of Publicis for both Pepsi and Coke was a data-led model built from Epsilon and CoreAI—a platform shared across every Publicis client.
Let’s be honest. Client conflict is an ancient, pointless custom from the Mad Men era, subsisting on client insecurity and agency pride. As holding companies centralize operations and clients become increasingly comfortable with platforms that they share with rivals, it’s time to accept that Pepsi and Coke could in theory hire the same global agency and nothing much would change.
