The Campaign

In Asia, where brands are incessantly bombarding people with advertising, Coca-Cola knows the need to entertain people differently. Teens and young adults are constantly engaging with different channels and switching between them, which makes grabbing their attention much harder. But with interesting content, there’s a chance to strengthen the connection with them. In this environment, we were asked to push the boundaries of happy experiences with engaging work that delivers on Coca-Cola’s ‘Open Happiness’ manifesto.

Results

Coca-Cola wanted to find refreshing ways to keep the brand platform ‘Open Happiness’ relevant. The brief was simple: Find an exciting way to engage people and explore how to make the product the centrepiece of our communications with a simple objective in mind: create more excitement and buzz for the classic. Everyone knows the happy “pssstttt!!!” sound of a Coke being opened. What if we gave it a new twist and invited people to have some fun with it? This idea gave us a great platform for a content project where the sound of happiness would get reinvented. Together with a young DJ/inventor, Jun Fujiwara, we created the Coca-Cola Remix Bottle. It captures sounds, instantly remixing them into cool original music tracks. This invention was then used to co-create a unique soundscape of Tokyo, together with the people of the city. We took this social music project around the Tokyo, bottling every sound we could and surprised audiences by instantly replaying the mixes. We documented this journey, turning it into a cheerful video and a series of music vignettes that were all shared online. By letting audiences co-create with the brand, we made ownable, shareable content over an array of channels, amplifying the project through blogs and press, ultimately refreshing what it means to ‘Open Happiness’.

This campaign was based on compelling content that would be capable of growing social traction and earning media for itself. As Coca-Cola has already built a roster of original content that it provides to its fans, this campaign leverages the pull of earlier Coca-Cola work created, to any new Coca-Cola content piece. Content was created as a part of an on-ground activation that was a social music project.

The digital intervention on the classic bottle took people by surprise, creating an experiential way of sharing happiness, as hundreds of sounds were bottled around Tokyo, and turned into video and audio mixes. On-ground, the project struck a chord with those who encountered it, eliciting curiousity and laughter whenever the bottle was opened to reveal the mixes, giving us great material for our branded content piece. Online, the video mixes reached over 131 countries, while the audio mixes were downloaded in over 53 countries – helping the campaign reach over 1,303,448 people at launch. These numbers are still growing.