Coca-Cola Sharing

In recent years Coca-Cola have had some very good marketing campaigns.

Some of my favourites are the ‘Unlock the 007 in You’, where unsuspecting customers are challenged to become 007 and get to another vending machine 1 floor up within 70 seconds, sounds easy enough, only Coke has hired many extras to make sure your journey is as hazardous as is safely possible 😉 I never saw it live, but the video of the campaign ( an amalgamation of different people) was very impressive.

Have a look for yourself:

I also love the Coca-Cola ads at Christmas, as one of my friends pointed out to me, it doesn’t really feel like Christmas until you have seen the ‘Holidays are Coming’ ad with the truck, lights, tell tale colour scheme and the great jingle.  They do variations of this and also have multiple videos or picture campaigns going at the same time.

They have also had some bad ideas, the one that comes to mind for me is the Coke Zero recent TV ad where the snack guy gives unsuspecting customers Coke Zero instead of Coca-Cola, showing them that there is no taste difference despite the lack of sugar, and revealing to them just before their movie.  I think I know the reason for this, there has been threats for a few years that the European Union will be introducing  a sugar tax, and Coke may have advance knowledge of this actually coming in and are trying to pre-empt this so as not to lose too many customers to the like of Pepsi Max.  Good idea, but a very poor execution with very little thought put in, in my opinion.

However, i really like their current – seemingly worldwide – campaign simply entitled ‘Share’, from what I can tell from the different versions of the campaign around the world, it’s about making the purchase of Coca-Cola a more social experience.  The 2 forms of the campaign I have seen are the Singapore/France campaign, this one has been created by Ogilv. The campaign that they created is, that the one coke product that you cant share is the can, until now. Working with Coke they designed and created 2 mini cans that fit together to look like one, so that you can share it with your friends, family or even a stranger (unlikely). It is a good campaign that does get people to share, but it lacked a certain oomph.

The second campaign that I have seen, and that I like a lot more is the Irish campaign, this one was created by the Leo Burnett agency in Dublin.

The premise behind the irish (& most of Europe) campaign is that you can share a bottle of coke with anyone, by putting their name on it, they rolled out 1000s of cans and bottles with ‘Me’, ‘You’ and 150 different names printed on them, so you can find your name or someone elses and share it with them.  They have even gone a step further as well and let you put a specific name on a virtual can and send it to your friends or family through Facebook.  It’s a really interesting campaign that will generate a lot of positivity towards Coca-Coal and will have a lot of people talking about it for a while to come. Here’s the Irish ad:

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