After a decade or so of reinventions and extensions, this one has become part of the marketing landscape now, but it all began in 2011 with one of those “creative away days” you convene when the brief is really serious…

Being brand new to the agency, and a bit nervous, my partner and I had prepared a heavy stack of scamped ideas — many of them terrible. Tucked in there was this one idea we kept coming back to: “What if you could replace one of the most famous names in the world with your name?” We shared it, stuck it on a wall — and it stuck in the mind of our newly arrived ECD, Chris Ford.

Once Chris had sprinkled some magic on it and picked it as The One, we gathered to figure out how to sell it, since it was not at all what the brief had asked for. One of the best experiences of my advertising career was watching Chris pitch to the marketing team, then listen, and tweak, and ponder, and re-pitch, and return, week after week, until this thing had met all the criteria for Coca-Cola’s seven lenses of happiness — or whatever it was called at the time. It was a masterclass in not giving up, and not being too stubborn, nor proud to make it all the way through the approval gauntlet. (Meanwhile, I think I might have declared the idea dead on hearing we wouldn’t be allowed to use the famous Coca-Cola Spencerian script...)

Then, suddenly we were green lit to speak to the factory guys about changing their entire label printing approach, and my partner and I were staying up late with census data, to somehow bring some science to the process of picking those 150 names for that first run.

And away it went. As things took off, we got a tonne of help from some very clever digital, strategic and creative folks, to shape this thing from scribbled idea all the way through to cultural phenomenon.