Coca-Cola Global,
‘Covid Christmas’
How can we forget the Christmas of 2020? A Christmas that was literally 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 to target Gen Z that amplifed the message and could run through December.
Working from an insight that the audience still expected to celebrate Christmas through the embrace of new technology, we created the Lockdown Christmas Calendar, ‘Magical Surprises to Share Every Day This December’.
A daily door of cute content, distributed through social media, designed to inspire sharing something personal with your 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 would reference a sweet cultural truth about Christmas, or the strange situation we were in as a society. Some were greetings, some were social promises.
To maximise the value of the content, we approached this with the 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 tone of voice was cozy but relevant and real.
The look & feel presented it’s own challenge. We needed something that needed to resonate culturally but also make stylistic sense alongside Coca-Cola’s 1930s Santa illustration. We also had to adhere to a strict red and white palette.
The breakthrough came when we realised we could borrow cues from animation and illustration styles that were monochrome and also had roots in the 1930s: we created a mash-up style of American rubber hose and Japanese chibi (with a hint of Manga speed-lines).
Graphical messages invited you to “screengrab & share” a rotating greeting (to add some fun + variability, but also for us to cram a lot more value into the communications)
More “screengrab & share” messages. I really love these rubber hose/chibi mash-up illos. Shout out Jade Spranklen.
Lenses were inspired by the “roulette” style of lens popular on Snapchat and TikTok. You don’t know what you’re going to get until it lands.
Another ‘roulette’ lens
One more “roulette” lens
Some text only “screengrab & share” messages
We also created a suite of really lovely digital stickers for you to decorate your photos, with warm, fuzzy and properly tongue-in-cheek messaging, some of which referencing the unusual approach to Christmas 2020.
This campaign toolkit became a truly global success, picked up by markets and activated around the world in Germany, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Georgia, Nigeria, Greece, Serbia, Switzerland, Sweden, Kazakhstan, UK, Belgium, Lithuania, Croatia, Azerbaijan, Netherlands, Slovenia and more.
Credits
Agency: Movement
Creative Direction & Strategy: Mark Freeman
Experience Director: Tim Ash
Design & Motion: Tom Shelton & Lewis Peat
Creative: Mike Stone
Ilustration & Animation: Jade Spranklen & Jack Cant