When it comes to managing the bottom line, very few people are the real deal. Mostly it’s people talking about slashing costs or “cutting out the nice to have’s”.
With rare exceptions, those people are idiots. They’re not the real deal – they just talk tough and hope they don’t get caught out.
A few of the more delusional ones actually think they know what they’re doing, even though every time they unleash another bout of their strategic genius on a business, things get worse instead of better.
Some people never learn.
In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve seen people from just about every profession do this. People who have learned to talk the talk without ever learning how to walk the walk.
But talk the talk well enough – whilst making sure to move to another company before the somewhat awkward chickens come home to roost, of course – and this can be the foundation for a lucrative career for the hard of thinking and/or people who are too cynical to care.
Some days, I wish I was enough of an idiot and/or enough of a sociopath to join them. It certainly sounds like a much easier life than working on your craft for long enough to get good at it.
At least the vast majority of the time – nobody who’s any good has a perfect batting average. Occasionally, the best laid plans of mice and men don’t quite work out the way you hoped. And sometimes life has to teach you a lesson to keep you humble. That happens.
But anyone with an “infallible recipe” or a “standardised process” who is trying to manage your bottom line for you almost certainly doesn’t understand what they’re doing well enough to be allowed out without a responsible adult present.
Tech people and engineers are particularly susceptible to this sort of thinking, I’ve found, because they are used to working in controlled environments where they can manage all the variables.
Not good ones, obviously – really good tech people and engineers can get beyond that very restricted thinking. But an amazing number of third-rate ones think they know how to manage a bottom line with their box of magic tricks. And yet they get it completely wrong, because they don’t really understand what they’re doing.
Nobody is immune
Before tech people and engineers get too defensive, this is not something only they do – I’ve just found it’s more common there than in most other places.
Accountants suffer from this too. I’ll happily acknowledge that very few people can destroy an otherwise successful business more comprehensively than an accountant who doesn’t know what they’re doing running rampant through the business, cutting costs wherever they find them.
But today, I’m not talking about those professions – albeit I think an accountant or two might well have been involved in the story below somewhere along the way.
Today I’m talking about marketers.
Normally, I think marketers get an unfairly hard time. They perform one of the few roles in most businesses where they need to reach out to the outside world, with no guardrails or safety net, and try to do something new to have a positive impact with customers of the business.
Whilst that doesn’t always work, of course, at the point they press “send”, nobody knows for sure one way or the other, no matter how much testing has been done with sample groups in advance.
It could be a great success. It could be a giant flop. Nobody knows for sure until the campaign runs.
But somehow, marketers have to develop a constant stream of new ideas, and put themselves out there every day, hoping they get more clicks and likes than they did the day before, or that their brand-scoring metrics at the end of the month will show an uptick based on whatever campaign they launched at the start of the month.
That’s hard. Really hard. So, I usually have a big dose of respect for the people who even try. It’s a tough gig.
The big picture
One thing marketers are almost invariably good at is keeping the focus on the big picture. The mission. The key attributes. The ICP. The brand values.
But occasionally, marketers lose the plot too.
Sometimes, they’re just having a momentary episode of some sort.
Other times, they start behaving like those engineers and tech people and end up making a whole host of short-sighted decisions which end up damaging the bottom line.
In some organisations, this is quite the badge of honour internally. At least until they get found out.
It can be a big career boost if the CFO gets wind of the fact that someone in the marketing department is taking an axe to the cost base and (so they think) managing the bottom line more purposefully than it was managed before.
In those environments, frankly the CFO is every bit as much to blame as the marketer. It’s a sure sign that, not only doesn’t the marketer understand their business, but their CFO doesn’t understand it either.
That’s unlikely to lead to a positive outcome.
The holidays are coming
This dynamic has played out recently in the Coca-Cola commercial for Christmas 2025.
There has been a lot of online commentary about this ad, with the word “backlash” making a regular appearance in articles written about it, because Coca-Cola has decided to make this year’s Christmas ad using AI.
My longstanding position as an AI sceptic notwithstanding, it’s a great illustration of how some unholy alliance of tech people, marketers, and accountants can spend $millions making everything worse, while completely missing the point in the process.
Of course, the tech folk and marketing people involved are talking up what hard work this all was, and what creative geniuses they are.
Which is nonsense, of course.
While it would be unfair to call the ad terrible – there are plenty of other, equally bad ads around – the finished product is neither creative nor genius.
But it took 100 people to refine 70,000 video clips, according to the hagiographic PR put out by those involved, in a vain attempt to make us think this was a good piece of work. The truth is, it’s an extremely average digital re-hashing of themes which had already been developed in past generations of Christmas Coca-Cola commercials over several decades.
I’m sure there were some tricky technical issues to overcome in the process, but whatever they were, when it comes to managing Coke’s bottom line, this commercial achieved just about the worst possible outcomes.
Seeing the wood for the trees
You see, creating an ad isn’t like negotiating a cheaper price for printer paper, where all the paper you might buy has identical technical characteristics, and all you’re doing is trying to buy it for the smallest amount of money possible.
When you’re buying printer paper, that’s a perfectly decent strategy for managing your bottom line.
Running an ad, however, is different.
For a start, none of your customers care where you buy your printer paper from. You can buy it from Mars, for all they care.
With an ad, though, whilst you might want to push the envelope and all that, the first thing you have to make sure of is that you don’t completely cheese off the customers you already have now.
In that context, given the number of times the word “backlash” appears in reports and commentaries about Coke’s Christmas ad this year, I’d say this campaign fell at the first hurdle.
If Coca-Cola is your favourite soft drink, you’re probably not going to stop buying it tomorrow. Equally if almost any brand irritates you enough, for long enough, you’ll switch.
For example, as a Windows user for 30-odd years, I’m now in the position where Microsoft are cheesing me off so much with the AI nonsense they’re packing into all their products, that I’m seriously thinking of switching my allegiance to a MacBook.
Rule number one of advertising: don’t cheese off all your customers.
Outcomes, not inputs
The second rule of advertising is that what matters are the results you get, not the inputs that go into the process.
If I could sell $100million of products on the back of a $2million commercial, but you wanted me to cut my commercial budget to $1million, on the back of which my ad only shifts $50million of product, who’s the winner here?
Not the customers, not the company, not the brand.
And, in the long run, not even the CFO or the investors either. Provided they keep their eyes on the prize.
See, there are very few circumstances, with the possible exception of impending bankruptcy restricting access to cash, when even the CFO and investors wouldn’t prefer to generate $98million in net revenue, after ad costs, than $49million.
The cost of the ad here is secondary to the additional revenue it brings into the business.
And if one of the outcomes from your ad is that a significant number of your customers hate what you’ve done to your once-iconic Christmas commercials so much, to the point where some of them are organising consumer boycotts of all the brands you own, that’s not a good outcome.
No matter how much you’ve saved in production costs.
The Real Thing
You’ve also got to keep the brand in mind at all times.
For a business like Coca-Cola, their brand is incredibly valuable to them. After all, the cost of mixing water with some sugary syrup is pennies a bottle.
At the end of Q3 2025, Coca-Cola had a market capitalisation of $285billion, despite only having a balance sheet a third that size.
While there are some technical reasons for that difference I won’t go into here, the fact that Coca-Cola is worth 3x as much on the stock market as the value of its assets is based on – in the widest possible sense – the value of its brand.
Remember, there are no subscription revenues here. Nobody is locked into buying Coke for the next 5 years. There’s no recurring revenue. No certainty as to the income stream.
Every time someone wanders into a shop, they decide whether to buy Coke or some other brand of fizzy, sugary water.
And ironically, for a lot of people of a certain age, one of Coke’s more memorable tag lines over the years is “The Real Thing”. Coke put a lot of time, effort, and money into convincing consumers that some other bland, average, sweet, fizzy water that looked a bit like Coca-Cola was a third-rate fake of “the real thing” – ie Coca-Cola.
Against the backdrop of using “The Real Thing” to promote and protect your brand, using AI to create your ads – and being publicly self-congratulatory about it, to make things worse – essentially says that “the real thing” doesn’t matter any more.
If any sort of fake garbage someone throws together in an AI studio can represent the real thing in the world of Coca-Cola’s advertising, so can the bootleg Coke I brew up in my bathtub and sell by the case-load off the back of a van in the dodgier areas of town.
That’s every bit as real as the advertising Coca-Cola puts out.
I might be in a small minority here, but if I was Coke’s CFO or CEO, the last thing I’d be wanting to do with my valuable intellectual property and brand positioning in my customers’ eyes as “the real thing” would be to encourage anyone else to think that large-scale fakery was OK.
As a way to damage my own brand in real time, there are not many better ways of doing that, as the fake soft-drink syrup taking the enamel off the inside of my bathtub at the moment can corroborate.
And it’s all so pointless
Industrial-scale stupidity like this is bad enough.
What makes it worse is that this was all so pointless.
Nobody buys Coca-Cola because they use AI in the commercials. That’s not going to bring in a single new customer, and risks cheesing off a significant number of existing customers.
The whole point about Coca-Cola’s holiday commercials is that they speak to a tradition. They’re supposed to bring back warm childhood memories. They’re not trying to sell you the latest version of a video game. All this tech-enabled advertising nonsense is an irrelevance.
Actually, more than an irrelevance. A pointless irrelevance.
Had I been Coke’s CFO or CEO (open to offers, folks) I’ve got a really easy way to cut costs, flatter the bottom line, and not risk cheesing off a significant number of my customers, while still evoking every bit of the warm childhood traditional feel that so many people look forward to in the Coca-Cola ads.
I just run “a classic ad from the archives” each year.
Sure I still have the same media costs. A 30-second commercial costs the same whatever imagery I put on there – even if it’s imagery from three or four years ago.
But my production costs each year are pretty much zero (and, possibly, actually zero).
It wouldn’t even take a huge amount of work to spin all this as speaking to the traditions of yesteryear, which are never far below the surface at Christmastime.
So, I’d get all the benefits of reminding people of my brand, I’d keep my position front-and-centre as one of the western world’s major Christmas holiday traditions, and I don’t have my customers organising boycotts of all the brands I own.
At the same time as I’m doing all that, instead of spending $millions on a new campaign (whether AI generated or not), all my savings from re-running “one from the archives” flow straight down to the bottom line.
And not only does nobody care that I’m running “one from the archives”, people actually look forward to it, if I do this the right way, and I enhance my brand at a minimal cost.
The bottom line lesson
In the words of the great Peter Drucker, there is nothing so pointless as doing something efficiently that doesn’t need doing at all.
To run this season’s AI-generated ad, Coca-Cola might well have thought they were pushing the envelope and developing some cutting-edge brand collateral, while boosting their bottom line.
Sadly, they have probably achieved none of that. And they managed to cheese off a significant number of their customers in the process.
Not what I’d call a victory – either for that business, or for common sense more generally.
This happens to be a particularly pertinent example, but the purpose of this article is to make this point.
When you’re managing your bottom line well, you’re not just managing your cost base.
You have to manage a much more complex series of variables, including the impact on your customers, whether you increase or reduce your average customer lifespan, whether your decisions will adversely impact your productive capacity, how motived your staff will be, and a range of other, often subjective and hard-to-pin-down, variables.
But the alternative is that you spend $millions to end up with your customers organising boycotts of your products.
However smart you think you’re being, that’s particularly dumb.
If you employ anyone in your finance, technology or marketing teams who think otherwise, I’d recommend firing them now.
No matter how good they are at talking the talk on a technical level, if you let those folks walk the walk, they’ll walk all over everything good about your business, and you’ll end up regretting it.
I promise. That’s the real thing.