Powerhouse by James Andrew Miller

Author:James Andrew Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062441393
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

PETER SEALEY, Executive:

I was a senior officer at Coca-Cola and was on a task force to help the Coca-Cola Company diversify. The company wanted to signal to Wall Street that it was a different Coca-Cola Company. I was one of six internal employees looking at what we could do, and the only two areas that came out that were candidates for acquisition were ethical pharmaceuticals and entertainment. All other industries, all other segments, would dilute the earnings of the Coca-Cola Company. I was interested in the entertainment option.

I was one of two employees sent over to Columbia Pictures to help them integrate into Coca-Cola via the acquisition of Columbia Pictures by Coca-Cola in 1983. I was president of marketing and distribution for North America for Columbia Pictures, and was president of Coca-Cola telecommunications. When we were doing the movie Ishtar, God help me, Warren Beatty was going crazy and I had to go to Michael and have him help me with him. Then Elaine May had the inner positive—the film that you were going to actually make the movie out of; you made the negative out of the inner positive—in the trunk of her car driving around Connecticut. If that car burned, we had no movie, it was gone. And Michael helped bring her back under control so we could release Ishtar—a truly terrible movie, but that’s another story.

In 1988, the Coca-Cola Company decided it couldn’t stay in the entertainment business, so they sold Columbia Pictures to Sony. I didn’t have a job at that point because they didn’t really have anything for me to do back in Atlanta, so I got my Ph.D. under a man named Peter Drucker at the Claremont Graduate University. I did my doctoral work on information technology. Then, on Thanksgiving 1990, Don Keough, president of the Coca-Cola Company, called and said, “Peter, I want you to come back to Atlanta and be head of global marketing for the Coca-Cola Company.” He said, “The only burr under my saddle”—exact quote—“has been the fact that Pepsi Cola has been generally acknowledged to have better advertising than the Coca-Cola Company has. I want to correct that before I retire, and I’m retiring in less than three years. So I want you to come back and straighten this out before I retire.” I said, “Don, I can do that, but I can’t do it with McCann Erickson and a traditional advertising agency. It won’t work. It is a factory that churns out thirty-second commercials. I worked with them for five years and I can turn this around, but I can’t do it that way.” “So how are you going to do it?” he asked. “Well, I’ll come back to you with a plan.” I saw how the creative process works in the motion picture industry, where the studio was essentially a banker, and the producer and director of the film were the creative forces, so I said to myself, Why can’t I do that in advertising? All I’m doing is producing little thirty-second movies.

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