The Challenge
Coca-Cola is one of the world's best known and best loved brands. It's not simply because Coca-Cola is refreshing — the power of the brand is built on the social moment of sharing a Coke with friends and family as the sharing of happiness.
In Romania, however, research showed that this social experience of sharing a meal has been in decline — with 6 out of 10 people eating dinner by themselves while watching TV.
Coca-Cola challenged us to bring their brand promise to life by inspiring Romanians to share happiness by sharing a Coke, and dinner, together.
The Idea
MRM understood that to get Romanians to make this change we had to interrupt and inspire them in a surprising new way. Because dinner is social, our idea was social — we broke the paradigm of one-way communication by creating the world's first TV spot integrated with Twitter to display live tweets sent by the target as the spot aired.
The viewer call-to-action was to send a tweet to someone they know, inviting that person to join the viewer for a companionable meal — and a Coke. Tweets were sent in using the hashtag #LetsEatTogether.
Viewers' tweets would then appear in a Twitter feed crawl bar (in almost real time) across the bottom of the TV spot while it aired. Of course, MRM monitored the tweets — we had to write special code to enable synchronization of the tweets with the playlist on each spot.
Users would then be notified in real time if their tweet got picked. With each airing of the spot, five to seven new invitations made it on the air, allowing people to connect in a way that was so remarkable it made the Romanian evening news.
By delivering the Coca-Cola message in this uniquely engaging and delightful way, the spot itself gave viewers a taste of the experience enjoyed when sharing a meal and a Coke.
The Execution
The Results
When was the last time you heard of anyone who was waiting in front of their TV for a particular spot to air? That's what happened with this commercial. It started a movement, with people eagerly waiting to see the spot so they could tweet an invitation.
TV stars and bloggers got in on the act, inviting each other for a meal live on TV. It became so popular that it was covered by hundreds of publications and blogs throughout Romania and worldwide.
PSFK said that it was "unlike any other spot ever created," with Mashable noting that "it actually made people wait for the ad."
Over the course of the campaign, more than 1,000 tweets with our campaign hashtag made it on air.
And the results delivered on communicating Coca-Cola's brand promise:
- 15% increase in consumers' association of Coca-Cola with a shared meal
- 1 million+ impressions on social media
- Reached the top 10 Twitter trending topics
- Grew the Romanian Twitter base by 15% within one month
The Awards
- Silver Drum @ Golden Drum 2013 for Innovative Campaigns (Multi Channel)
- Best Use of Technolo