Fanta Western Europe, FANTAxYOU
How do you make a brand relevant to an audience that can spot a faker in seconds? That was the challenge Fanta handed us, and it became a three-and-a-half year creative partnership built from one simple idea.
Fanta is one of the world's most iconic brands. But at the time it was failing to recruit teens and showing significant year-on-year volume decline. Teens were more sophisticated than ever, building their own worlds at the intersection of digital and IRL, mixing and remixing culture into their own lexicons. By the time most brands caught up, teens had already moved on. I also saw a wider cultural shift: collaborations between brands and artists, sportspeople and influencers were becoming the dominant creative currency.
So I created FANTAxYOU. A UGC collaboration between Fanta and its audience. An open invitation for teens to co-create across every aspect of the brand, on the platforms they already loved.
My involvement extended into the overall digital strategy, leading the Halloween charter, building the always-on social content strategy, producing a market roll-out toolkit, and a range of other activations.
Always On
The first move was creating a content library for local European markets to populate their social channels under #FANTAxYOU. The strategic principle was simple: make it look like it was made by you. Lower the production threshold so that Fanta's content resembled something a teen could make themselves, modelling the idea that the brand was in the hands of its audience and inviting them to get involved. Over two years I led the creation of hundreds of pieces of silly, lo-fi content. Professionally produced, of course, and always within brand guidelines, hitting product and brand messaging. But it never looked like it.
I covered calendar moments, whimsical micro-campaigns, and everything in between. In practice, I also learned that genuine UGC was often difficult to repost on Fanta's own channels, for legal or brand communication reasons. The lo-fi content served to set the tone and create the conditions for larger, more controlled UGC campaigns across the calendar.
Results, after year one
Ad relevance up 54%. Ad persuasion up 59%. Teen penetration rose 3.3% across all 12 European markets. Volume sales up 3.7% year-on-year. FANTAxYOU generated over 92 million social impressions and tens of thousands of pieces of UGC. We had doubled our objectives.
Footnote
The French Fanta team made a YouTube reality show out of FANTAxYOU: videomakers living in a house, coached to make adverts for Fanta, with the winner shooting the Halloween TV commercial for France. It went well enough to run for two sequels over three years, generating minor controversy, clapbacks and parody versions. I only recently discovered this. I'm delighted.