Coca-Cola and Unilever are shifting their digital focus away from traditional campaign sites and towards community platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, as social media begins to dictate their marketing activity in 2010, announced NMA magazine today.

The FMCG giants are moving away from sites created on a campaign-by-campaign basis in favour of investment in existing communities. While both companies will continue to create campaign sites for certain brands in the immediate future, they have said the long-term future lies with social media on platforms populated by their target consumers.

According to the magazine, Coca-Cola will position its official Facebook and YouTube pages as the lead online channels for upcoming international activity for its Coke Zero and Fanta brands, new media age understands.

Prinz Pinakatt, the Coca-Cola Company’s interactive marketing manager for Europe, said, “In some cases some of our campaigns won’t need a coke.com-hosted site. In most cases these will still exist as it’s the most obvious destination for a consumer, but it might only be a page linking to YouTube encouraging people to join the community there. “We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform,” Pinakatt added.

Unilever is also abandoning campaign sites in favour of long-term community engagement platforms. Cheryl Calverley, Unilever UK’s senior global manager for Axe Skin, said “It’s natural online to go to the place where people are already consuming media. It’s less effort to ask people to leave an environment they’re already in.”

So the question for us as digital marketing specialists is whether developing a site for every campaign is cost-effective and worth-doing it. Community-based platforms prove more engaging and long-term beneficial for the brand visibility and consumer loyalty. Online brand experience will now become even more important part of the marketing mix and proper digital strategy planning focusing on consumer journey will be necessary more than ever before. Sounds challenging, but it’s rewarding.