Coca-Cola Global,
‘Covid Christmas’
How can we forget the Christmas of 2020? A Christmas like no other. The future was uncertain, the world was in and out of lockdown and enforced social distancing was still the norm.
Coca-Cola's Christmas campaign led with the idea 'The Greatest Gift You Can Give This Christmas Is Yourself'. We were tasked with creating a market toolkit for a digital content experience targeting Gen Z that amplified the message and could run through December. Working from the insight that the audience still wanted to celebrate Christmas through new technology, we created the Lockdown Christmas Calendar, 'Magical Surprises to Share Every Day This December'. A daily door of playful content, distributed through social media, designed to inspire sharing something personal with loved ones, even if you couldn't be physically present.
These shareable messages took the form of Snapchat lenses, digital stickers and screengrabbable animations. Each piece of content referenced a sweet cultural truth about Christmas, or the collective strangeness of that particular December. Some were greetings, some were social promises. To maximise the value of the content, we worked to a twin policy of surprise and variability. You never knew what was behind the door, and much of the content had a roulette of multiple outcomes. You never knew what you were going to get.
The look and feel presented its own challenge. We needed visuals that would resonate culturally but also make stylistic sense alongside Coca-Cola's 1930s Santa illustration, within a strict red and white palette. The breakthrough came when we realised we could borrow from animation and illustration styles that were monochrome and shared roots in the 1930s: a mash-up of American rubber hose and Japanese chibi, with a hint of manga speed-lines.
We also created a suite of digital stickers for decorating your photos, with warm, fuzzy and tongue-in-cheek messaging, some referencing the strange circumstances of Christmas 2020.
The toolkit went truly global, picked up and activated across 19 markets: Germany, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Georgia, Nigeria, Greece, Serbia, Switzerland, Sweden, Kazakhstan, UK, Belgium, Lithuania, Croatia, Azerbaijan, Netherlands, Slovenia and more.