PLay A Coke
Grab a Coke, put on some music, and have read below. However, If you don’t want all the extra carbonation, just watch this case study video.
Teens were drinking less pop. Not the best news for coca-cola.
With music being an undisputed passion point for teens, Coke wanted to leverage it. This was the brief. While the brand pushed us to pursue a festival sponsorship opportunity or to develop a promotion that gave away concert tickets, we weren’t confident either would mean much in the eyes of the target OR set the brand apart from others doing similar things. Instead, we started with a simple truth about music and teens: they already have all the music they want right in their hands.
With music already in one hand, we figured out how to put coke in the other and connected the two in a meaningful way.
In the summer of 2016, bottles of Coca-Cola literally became the soundtracks of summer, whether you were going on a road trip, watching a Jays game, or just hanging out on the beach. We called it Play a Coke, a name that leveraged the equity built by Play a Coke in previous years.
The bottles themselves controlled the music.
We built a partnership with Spotify and together we curated almost 200 unique playlists. Each was designed to compliment a different summer moment or mood, ultimately allowing shoppers to select bottles that were relevant to the exact moments they were purchasing them. The massive range of playlists also meant Coke became contextually relevant every time a shopper came in contact with it - a tool that incentivized repeat purchase throughout the promotion.
The cool part though, was how it all worked.
With the help of an app, teens could immediately access the playlist on their Cokes by quite literally playing them. They could simply point their phones at the play button on their label and hit play. Then to change the track, they simply twisted their Coke left or right.
The program outperformed share a coke, Coke’s largest promotion in Canada, ever.
+35% more retail displays were ordered by partners, compared to the year prior (for Share a Coke); it was the largest fountain cup program in Coke’s history; and there were over 135M Play A Coke bottles sent into market. As the momentum built pre-launch, partners like McDonald’s jumped on board with incremental support. They wanted their own exclusive playlists AND asked us to create the content announcing them.
One things we got very right was making sure we could picture every bottle posted on social.
This lead us to create a lot of hyper relevant playlist names that fueled a flood of earned media. We tapped into pop culture themes like summer blockbusters and sports.
We wrote playlist names that complimented the smallest and the biggest occasions.
We also created some that people could use as badges and others that could simply use as captions.
We also created a playlist with one of the most popular internet personalities at the time, Lilly Singh. We knew it would be a popular bottle, but couldn’t have anticipated how sought after it would become.
