LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE 360 NORTH AMERICA: Retail giant Coca Cola conceded its mobile offering is still very much dispensable, despite recent efforts to make the technology more essential to its brand.

Tom Daly, the company’s group director for mobile, speaking on the panel ‘Media, Entertainment and the Video Explosion,’ said mobile was still not at the core of the company’s operations, meaning mindshare internally and for its customers revolves more around TV content for advertising in particular.

Despite its struggles, Coca Cola has indeed ramped up its efforts in mobile by adopting Apple Pay and Android Pay in its vending machines, to make it the largest acceptor of NFC payments in the world. It is also working with Ericsson to bring more connectivity to rural markets.

“The unfortunate fact is, if everyone turned off all their phones now, we won’t sell one less Coke,” said Daly. “Our mind share is TV, so mobile gets put into the experimental phase. We need to now go beyond this, and make mobile indispensable and irrevocable.”

CNN
Cathy Farr, senior director, mobile and emerging technologies at CNN, echoed Daly’s sentiments for her own division, revealing that “CNN sees itself primarily as a TV company”.

cnn“We are exploring different voices as a way to push out our content. Through mobile and even with platforms on apps like Snapchat, we are aiming to be more social in our tone, despite delivering serious news.”

Both Daly and Farr also conceded that they had yet to figure out concrete ways to tap into the huge opportunity that exists with its customer and readership data, which also presents a huge opportunity.

“We are trying about 10 things and failing on 8 of them,” said Farr. “Data is new and we need to figure out what to do. We can see someone may like entertainment stories, but combining the experience that a company like CNN offers and mixing it in with the important things remains a challenge.”