Insight:
Coca-Cola and Christmas are a perfect
combination. The brand has heritage of promotion during the festive
season dating back decades. The brand's core value of Happiness
chimes perfectly with the season of giving, receiving and
celebrating family relationships. Previous Christmas campaigns in
German-language markets included the Coke Truck Tour, which visits
Christmas markets and lets kids send their wishes to Santa.
In 2009 we wanted to increase brand
engagement and brand love and to broaden our pre-existing Christmas
assets. Our Christmas challenge was to leverage this festive
heritage online and make happiness digital. That way we would make
the experience more engaging and more interactive.
We developed three key insights about
consumers at Christmas:
1.They are very sentimental and family
focused and spend lots of time visiting family members to
celebrate.
2.Consumers really enjoy decorating
their homes and sending personal messages and greeting cards to
their friends.
3.Christmas is also a time when
consumers think about others, those less fortunate than
themselves.
These three insights led us to a
campaign that not only satisfied consumers' need to decorate their
world, the desire to greet their families and friends but also to
demonstrate their concern for others.
Strategy:
Our insight led us to an innovative
and fully integrated engagement concept that brought Coke's festive
message into the digital age. We gave consumers the opportunity to
brighten up their world and create a Christmas landscape that was
as bright online as it was in the places of their cities and on
their Christmas tree.
We developed a tool that allowed users
to decorate the houses of their loved ones online, and to send the
final result as a personal message to their nearest and dearest. We
extended the concept across the digital landscape, letting them
decorate YouTube, and add festive lights to their social media
profile.
Finally, we would help people show
they cared at this special time of the year, by including a
charitable donation for every decoration on our microsite, raising
money for children's charity "Ein Herz für Kinder" ("a heart for
children").
Coke's empowerment would create
emotional interaction with the brand, increasing their love for
Coke and making the brand's festive associations more relevant than
ever.
The message ran across all German
language markets, concentrating on the German market itself as well
as reaching out to families in Austria and Switzerland.
Execution:
We gave consumers the tools to
brighten up the world, spread the Christmas spirit and do something
good. A specially developed Google Maps application on the Coca
Cola Christmas landing page allowed consumers to search for
addresses, decorate a selected house with Christmas decorations and
lights and share it via a "Send-a-friend" application. For every
decorated house, Coca Cola donated €1 to Ein Herz für Kinder, with
the total donation displayed on the website.
At the same time we enabled consumers
to use our lights, stars and flashing snowmen to decorate their own
photos - even from their mobile phones. We leveraged our decoration
application via social media, allowing consumers to decorate their
own profiles on social media platforms such as StudiVZ and
Facebook. Once a user decorated a house, they could also publish it
on Facebook via a "Badge of Honour" that recognised them as a
Christmas lights decorator, and thus a charitable Good
Samaritan.
On StudiVZ, users could decorate their
profiles with Christmas decorations and get in touch with Coca Cola
via a specially branded Santa Claus profile to celebrate the
Christmas spirit. On YouTube they could add decorations via an
interactive online ad.
We promoted our tools via online and
mobile as well as offline activities such as TV, print, out of home
and PR.
Results:
Our Christmas message created real
resonance with consumers, spreading seasonal good wishes and
building Coca Cola's digital relationship with the festivities.
More than 250,000 houses were
decorated via the Coke Christmas homepage and nearly 250,000 social
media profiles got a festive makeover.
Our interactive YouTube masthead was
decorated 1.5m times, delivering 12m ad impressions.
Consumers sent more than 400,000
individually decorating greetings via Coke.
Our Santa Claus profile gained 125,000
friends while the whole campaign generated 320m consumer contacts
and 1.7m website visits.
And most importantly we raised
€250,000 for our charity Ein Herz für Kinder, attracting extensive
positive PR for Coke.