Best Coca Cola Ad Campaigns that Redefined Innovation

The main advertising endeavour in Coca Cola's history was executed through coupons championing free samples of the soft drink. The success of coupons, a creative strategy at the time, was succeeded by print ads and the circulation of promotional items bearing the Coca Cola symbol to partaking pharmacies. Forwarding to the 1970s, Coca Cola's marketing and advertising began to mirror a brand associated with fun, friends and great times. After establishing this sentiment, they had a string of successful promotional and product launch campaigns. Due to these campaigns, coca cola widely started being known as ‘coke’. Many fondly recollect the "Have a Coke and a Smile" commercial featuring a youthful fan giving Pittsburgh Steeler, "Mean Joe Greene", a thirst-quenching bottle of Coca‑Cola. Furthermore, 1980s marked the beginning of numerous catchy and notable slogans like “Coke is It!”,“Catch the Wave” and “Can’t Beat the Feeling”.

Always Coca Cola Campaign

1993 marked the beginning of a list of successful brand campaigns that actively involved consumers. The very first being, ‘Always Coca Cola’ campaign, better known as the ‘Coca Cola Polar bear’ campaign. This was because this campaign had a series of ads featuring polar bears. The reason for choosing polar bears was their association with characteristics like naiveté, fun and playful. This campaign was responsible for the permanent branding of polar bears with Coca Cola’s image. Out of the 27 ads released during this campaign, ‘Northern Lights’ commercial immortalized the link between Coke and Polar bears. The world of Coca Cola features a 7-foot-tall Polar bear which is still a hit with many customers, young and old.

Open Happiness Campaign

In 2009, they initiated the ‘Open Happiness’ campaign. This was intended to be a global brand awareness campaign as well as Coke’s very first integrated marketing campaign. The central message of the campaign was for people around the world to pause and enjoy life’s unadorned moments with a Coke. The message of ‘Open a Coke Open Happiness’ was reiterated by prints advertisement, billboards, TV advertisements, and in-store ads. They focused on making their digital marketing stronger by creating Coca Cola social media handles. They featured advertisements with their ‘Coca Cola Happiness song’ sung by Cee-lo green, Travie McCoy and Brandon Urie, the top artists of that time. This campaign was also successful on a global scale with people from all around the world singing the Coca Cola Happiness song.

Open Games, Open Happiness

Featured during the 2010 winter Olympics games in Vancouver this campaign reiterated the message of Open Happiness. This was followed by a social media campaign, ‘Expedition 206'. This was a project where three happiness ambassadors traveled all around the world to 206 nations in 365 days with one goal. The goal was to understand what satisfies people and makes them happy. The inspiring year-long voyage was recorded and conveyed by means of blog posts, tweets, recordings, and pictures. Social media helped them increase the reach of this project.

Coca Cola Happiness Machine

Coca Cola partnered with definition 6, a company that specializes in interactive integrated marketing campaigns. This extension was developed with an intention to expand Coca Cola's target market to college students. They put up ‘Happiness Vending machines’ in colleges which delivered surprise doses of happiness to unsuspecting students. These surprises dispensed by the machine included a never-ending supply of flowers, pizzas, sunglasses, a twelve-foot sub and a never-ending supply of Coke. The spontaneous reactions were captured on hidden cameras over two days and the video was posted online. This extension of the ‘Open Happiness’ campaign was a perfect example of a successful and viral interactive marketing campaign.

Share a Coke Campaign

Share a Coke campaign involved changing the generic wrapping on coke bottle to say ‘share a coke with a...’. The purpose was to make another successful campaign using interactive marketing. The idea behind the campaign was to develop a more personal relationship with the customers. They wanted to achieve this by inculcating in their subconscious an inspiration to share moments of happiness with their loved ones. Another aspect of this campaign was to change coca cola’s target market from baby boomers to millennials.

The term ‘Share a Coke’ was chosen because the campaign started with a limited number of names. Because of that Coca Cola emphasized on buying the product for loved ones. After the initial launch, they allowed the customers to choose the names that would be printed on the coke bottle using the Coke Bottle Name Generator. They used social media to simplify this process and easily reach the millennial audience. Before this campaign, it was easier for the millennial audience to replace Coca Cola’s products with substitutes. That's the sentiment they wanted to change by connecting emotionally with the millennial audience.

Australia was the first country where this campaign was implemented. They printed 150 of the most popular names in Australia on Coke bottles, for example, ‘Share a Coke with Matt’. They implemented this campaign in various countries with unique twists best suited to that country. The unique twists included turning Israel’s largest billboard into an interactive sign which greeted citizens. In China, they printed nicknames instead of first names to give a more personal feeling.

The US extension of this campaign came out with coke bottles printed with popular song lyrics. The campaign was popularly known for sharing a coke with names and songs. They also released a number of commercials on television and memes on Coca Cola’s social media. This is the perfect example of a word of mouth campaign because of the positive response from the millennial audience. In conclusion, it has been one of Coke’s most successful campaigns. And all millennials are using #shareacoke to spread the love on social media.

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