The Coca-Cola Company Transforms Consumer Experiences with Unified Consumer Data Solutions Built on AWS

Since its founding in 1892, Coca-Cola has grown into a total beverage company with over 2.2 billion servings of its drinks enjoyed around the world every day. Coca-Cola wanted to create a unified view of the consumer to drive campaigns across multiple channels including paid, owned, and earned properties around the globe.
 
Coca-Cola’s MarTech and AdTech teams started using AWS in 2013 to capture consumer data. However, they managed and implemented marketing campaigns separately across four regions: Asia Pacific; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; Latin America; and North America. To break down siloes and streamline marketing processes, Coca-Cola wanted one global marketing technical stack that could handle the different privacy and legal considerations of each market while continuing to work with internal and external applications. “We considered all the technical capabilities we wanted and realized that AWS has every service that we need,” says Sunil Ramakrishnappa, senior director of global architecture and engineering at Coca-Cola.
 
To transform its existing CDS solution into a standardized, globally scalable marketing tool, Coca-Cola used AWS Professional Services. Coca-Cola’s MarTech and AdTech teams needed CDS 2.0 to cater to local markets while also performing and scaling globally. So the company relied on experience from the AWS Professional Services team as it considered how to handle the massive scale of its data and all the government regulations.
 
Using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), a managed migration and replication service trusted by customers globally to securely migrate databases with minimal downtime, Coca-Cola migrated more than 1 billion records to the CDS 2.0 solution. Coca-Cola deployed it across all regions over 1 year, taking time to test so that campaigns could run effectively throughout the migration. CDS 2.0 uses over 25 AWS services and is available for Coca-Cola’s brands in nearly every market. “We successfully built CDS 2.0 and migrated without having any business impact, which showed that AWS has all the cloud services that meet our business needs and that AWS Professional Services was the right collaborator for our mission,” says Ramakrishnappa.

Coca-Cola’s MarTech and AdTech teams use various marketing solutions to gather data and insights into local markets. Before the migration, it was difficult for teams to compare performance when running the same campaign in different regions. Coca-Cola built the CDS and an Integration Hub, which uses AWS so that changes in the data profiles are propagated downstream to data processors. Coca-Cola ingests and securely shares data consistently with internal and external systems using CDS 2.0. As a result, Coca-Cola gets global and consistent consumer data and more value out of that data. “Our solution built on AWS provides us with insights about interactions with our consumers so that we can enhance the experience and better serve them,” says Ramakrishnappa.
 
Everything Coca-Cola does is on a global scale. In 1 year, the company runs thousands of promotions. Using Amazon Aurora— which provides high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility —Coca-Cola can handle multi-region deployment. Because the company works globally, the middle of the night in one region is the middle of the day in another. Coca-Cola minimizes disruptions by using blue/green deployments, a strategy that creates two identical environments, to manage cutover time on its globally deployed databases. Coca-Cola also has global observability with its CDS 2.0 solution, giving employees more visibility across the company’s operations with centralized logging and monitoring. “Using AWS, we apply structure and discipline so that we can follow industry best practices as we develop products globally,” says Ramakrishnappa.
 
With its global CDS 2.0 solution, Coca-Cola increased efficiency and accelerated campaign and promotion releases, quickly rolling out targeted marketing campaigns across regions in weeks rather than years. “Technology is advancing at a breakneck pace,” says Ramakrishnappa. “When a new idea arises, we want to scale from one market to 200 markets within weeks or months instead of years. Using AWS technology and processes, we can do that.” Previously, Coca-Cola would test an idea in one region and then recreate it for the three others if it was successful. The company can now encourage local marketing teams to iterate, innovate, and learn quickly. In 2024, MarTech and AdTech teams at Coca-Cola are using the CDS 2.0 solution in over 112 markets. These teams have run over 250 implementations across various regions and developed over 200 user stories.

The more that Coca-Cola knows about its customers, the better it can cater to them. Now that its MarTech and AdTech teams have a global solution for increasing data visibility, the company plans to further enhance business operations and personalize content and experiences. CDS 2.0 provides the data foundation Coca-Cola needs to use advanced technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence, to continuously optimize and improve its marketing efforts.
 
“Using AWS, we’ve created a complete view of our global operations,” says Ramakrishnappa. “With this single pane of glass, we can understand what is going on across the organization, which is a huge benefit for us.”