For decades, Coca-Cola has been synonymous with “real” – its brand philosophy rooted in the insight that magic lives in the unexpected moments that elevate the everyday into the extraordinary. Over the past few years, Coca-Cola has launched Coca-Cola Creations…a way to connect with younger consumers and stay at the forefront of culture by creating new flavors based on a keen understanding of what is trending on social media.
The brief in 2023 was simple: Use the unique capabilities and features of social to launch Coke Creations Y3000, a version of Coke that is meant to taste like the “future”, peaking the curiosity and excitement of Coke Creations super fans old and new with futuristic sensory and visual experiences.
We wanted to find the right campaign and partners to inspire fans to take a journey to the Year 3000 – in a way that only Coca-Cola can do. By focusing on this objective, we wanted to demonstrate how Coca-Cola continues to be at the forefront of culture and trending real-time conversations, while supporting the new Coca-Cola Creations LTO product launch.
In early 2023, TikToker Jake Shane posted a comedic video acting as a Coca-Cola product and the Jonas Brothers responded, and thus the start of our relationship was formed. The post went viral on TikTok and Ogilvy did what we did best, we engaged with the videos and were able to surface community insights from those engagements.
Our community management responses to Jake Shane earned over 20K+ earned organic engagements and our engagements with the Jonas Brothers garnered over 32K+ earned organic engagements!
With this earned moment on social media and a new relationship with the Jonas Brothers…Ogilvy identified this opportunity as the perfect way to launch the new Y3000 Coke Creations flavor on the way. What better way to launch Y3000 than with the Jonas Brothers, leveraging their famous Year 3000 song? On top of having a hit song called Year 3000 that they had just relaunched a 2.0 version with Busted, they were in the middle of a huge hit tour that was hugely popular with our younger consumers.
As it grew closer to launch, we put together creative ideas for how we could potentially partner with them, including an influencer brief for the Jonas Brothers and had ongoing conversations with both the brand team + Walmart Customer Lead to incorporate our ideas into what ultimately made its way to the Jonas Brothers.
The Jonas Brothers were excited to officially collaborate with us, especially after they saw how we showed up in their comment sections during the Jake Shane x Jonas Brothers saga. They could really tell that we understood them and their communities and were impressed with how quickly we reacted in real-time.
It was important to the execution that the video produced, while an ad, still felt authentic to the Jonas Brothers unique style. In the brief, we identified the key elements of the video that had to be featured:
Feature yourself, the product, a tasting moment, and a nod to the Y3000 song
No other beverages and no other recognizable branding
Tag @cocacola and include #CocaColaCreations and #CokePartner
We provided them with five potential creative ways-in along with key thought-starters under each one. They were all based on community insights, as well as the Jonas Brothers’ interests in mind.
Once we received the videos from the Jonas Brothers team, we gave feedback and helped build out a strategy for how we would roll this out which included making the recommendation for us to post and collab with both Jonas Brothers & Walmart in the same post on IG. Many of our thought-starters were incorporated into the final video the Jonas Brothers created, which showcased the strength of our insights and the level of trust that we had built with the Jonas Brothers in our previous engagements with them.
Once the posts were live, we actively engaged the fans with unique 1:1 community management responses. Ultimately, this helped spark additional conversation and engagement opportunities by leaning into the Jonas Brothers fandom in a truly organic way.
Since our engagements with the Jonas Brothers began in early 2023, we have seen an outpour of love for the campaign from fans, including younger consumers.
In the past couple months, the hero content on TikTok has garnered 150.5K+ organic earned engagements and 92.6+ million impressions. This was such a moment for fans who saw the campaign — some even took it to themselves to recreate the video for fun! On Instagram, Coca-Cola’s collab post with the Jonas Brothers performed above benchmark, showcasing that the campaign’s launch content and partnerships resonated with consumers. In fact, the largest spike in earned conversation was the creation announcement and partnered posts with the Jonas Brothers. The collab content on IG garnered an additional 96,865+ earned organic engagements + 1,364,597+ impressions.
In regards to how this aided the overall launch, compared to the most recent creation launches in NA this year (Coca-Cola Move & Coca-Coca Ultimate), Y3000 has driven the second highest positive earned sentiment (11.6% positivity compared to Ultimate’s 9.9% & Move’s 19.7%). The overall campaign had:
200,206,486 Total Impressions
97,259,244 organic impressions
1,029,472,421 paid impressions
6,185,842 Total Engagements
276,480 organic engagements
5,909,362 paid engagements
Additionally, Coca-Cola Creations took over The Sphere in Las Vegas on November 9th and the content was run on TikTok as paid content and garnered 11.1+ Million impressions and 5,566+ organic earned engagements! Showing that fans just couldn’t get enough of this epic collaboration and ultimately helping make Y3000 a successful product launch for Coke Creations.
