L-R: Omid and Luke had an idea and ran with it. Source: Supplied
ON a winter's night in Kings Cross 2010, under the perma-glow of the iconic Coca-Cola sign, a group of creatives waited for Coke's summer campaign idea to go live. Standing in the cold the team watched as the billboard flashed to the famous red and white swirl, now emblazoned with the message 'Share a Coke with Matt'.
Few campaigns require representatives from the creative agency to watch over the installation, or in this case the activation of a billboard, but a lot was riding on this one. Earlier in the year, the Coca-Cola product team had briefed out a 151 word call-to-arms in the hope of solving a huge and immediate concern – teens and young adults' lack of connection with the super brand.
In the year leading up to January 2011, Coca-Cola sales were flat lining in the face of a cold start to summer and reduced consumer confidence. Far from being a one-off, Coke had been battling stagnating global sales for years.
The beverage giant had enduring positive sentiment among all ages, including the difficult-to-sway 14 – 24 group, however in the market conditions leading up to that summer, this wasn't translating into sales or actual consumption of Coke products. People loved Coke but they weren't drinking it.
After a hectic competitive pitch incumbent agency Ogilvy emerged victorious with what was to become the original 'Share a Coke' campaign.
The #shareacoke billboard in Kings Cross, Sydney. Source: Supplied
A deceptively simple idea, the now instantly recognisable 'Share a Coke' campaign saw the rebranding of Coke, Diet-Coke and Coke-Zero products with 150 of Australia's most popular names. The additional 'Mate', 'Bestie', 'Mum' and a seasonal 'Santa' were also thrown in for extra consideration.
In what would become the official start of the Share campaign street viewers were asked to send an SMS to the King Cross sign containing their, or a friend's, name which was then flashed to the landmark billboard for all to see. A subsequent MMS was sent to the contributor with thousands of names submitted in the first few hours the billboard was active.
In a marketing landscape now dominated by content savvy brands like Red Bull, bemused passers-by watched as names flashed one-by-one to the landmark sign, unaware they were also watching Coke's return to advertising dominance.
Consumers were directed to search out the names of BFFs, family members or workmates in order to share a Coke with them. More often than not, the search was documented on social media leading to tens of thousands of submissions under the #shareacoke hashtag and generating fresh interest in the 128 year old brand
By campaign end Coca-Cola saw a 4 per cent rise in consumption overall and a 7 per cent rise among the targeted teen to young adult age group; triple the growth of Coke's previous best summer. Now the gold standard in advertising case studies, the 'Share a Coke' campaign has been rolled out across 70 international markets and counting. Summer 2014 marked its entrance into the US market.
Everyone wanted to see their name on a can of Coke. Source: Supplied
Success is not totally assured with this summer's expansion into the US but things are looking positive for the beverage giant. Already the Wall Street Journal is reporting a 2 per cent increase on domestic sales covering the 2014 summer months and is touting the first increase in annual sales for America in ten years. And if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by the market for rare names is strong. A quick eBay search reveals over 1200 listings for collectable Cokes, including 30 bids for the rare find 'Sydney'.
Just why 'Share a Coke' has been so successful across a multitude of varied advertising climates is anyone's guess but at least some of its triumph is due to the inherent magic of the Coca-Cola brand says senior creative Luke Acret, who along with creative partner Omid Amidi, were a part of the wider team to work on the original Australian campaign.
"I don't think this campaign could have been successful for just any brand. There's a magic, a warmth about Coke, which not every brand in the world has and I'd even go so far as to say people love Coke," he said.
"It's a part of their childhood, it's been present in their life and it makes people happy. So when you have an iconic product like that and you start to introduce a personalisation, someone's name even, the marriage of those two things becomes really powerful, because you're taking something that people already love, and making it about them".
Now based at agency Pereira & O'Dell in San Francisco, the Share campaign is still a career highlight for Acret and Amidi.
"It was interesting. When you think of Coca-Cola, you don't think of 'declining sales'. You think of this always successful, never struggling brand. It was challenging to wrap your head around the fact that you're going to be working towards helping a brand you assume doesn't need help — that it simply sells itself and everyone loves it," says Amidi.
Wanna share a Coke with Natalie? Of course you do. Source: News Limited
From an executional point of the view the campaign leveraged the growing trend towards crowdsourced content; "When we spoke about 'sharing a Coke with Mel' we were talking about real Mels sending in real photos that we then used to populate commercials."
User-generated content campaigns are now standard if social phenomena like Australia's Next Top Selfie are anything to go by, but at the time it was new territory for Coke. It was also novel in other ways, adds Acret: "It was such a simple idea but it was groundbreaking because it used Coke as the advertising platform. That had not ever been done before to that extent. With that idea, Coke cans became billboards".
As to the road blocks thrown up by the logistics of the Share idea; "For any brand let alone a super-brand like Coke, changing or even coming close to modifying logos and labels is a huge deal, it's their identity so we had to very careful with that and it was something that the project team had to mindful of. The consultation with the product team and Atlanta (Coca-Cola's home base) was intense" a sentiment backed by former Director of Sales for Coca-Cola pacific, now head of Europe Lucie Austin.
Making reference to the issues inherent in messing with a 128 year old brand, Austin had this to say; "the idea was conceived with the names printed in the traditional "Coca-Cola" Spencerian script. We couldn't do that due to trademark issues, so we created a brand-new typeface inspired by the "Coke" logo".
Coca-Cola made sure to test the idea across numerous and varied markets before beginning the expansion into the lucrative US market but if the recent upswing in sales is anything to go by, expect to see an expansion of the Share campaign next summer.
Adds Amidi: "People love to see their name in bright lights. And if not theirs, then someone they know. It's exciting".
Expect to see a lot of these billboards in Times Square in New York. Source: Supplied
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