Fanta Western Europe, ‘FANTAxYOU’
I was behind the creative strategy for a huge brand activation idea for Fanta Western Europe that ran over 3 and a half years started from one simple idea.
Fanta is one of the world’s most iconic brands. But, at the time, it had been failing to recruit teens and was showing a large year-on-year decline in volume sales. With teens becoming more sophisticated than ever, we had to help Fanta catch up, increase brand relevance and increase sales.
We all know that when brands to try to do teen, they’re stepping into dangerous territory. Teens spot fakers a mile away.
What we also knew: teens were starting to create their own worlds, mixing up digital and IRL, mixing and re-mixing culture to create their own lexicons, and by the time adults have caught up, teens have already moved on. This concept was also reflected in the amount of collaborations that had begun happening between brands X other brands or individuals such as sportspeople, artists and influencers.
We created ‘FANTAxYOU’ - a UGC collaboration between Fanta and you, the audience. An invitation for teens to collaborate and co-create in every aspect of the brand, on the platforms they loved the most.
Moving into activating the campaign, our involvement extended into leading the overall digital strategy, leading the Halloween charter for Fanta, creating and producing the ‘always on’ content strategy for social media, providing a toolkit of ideas for market roll-out, and some other innovative activations.
Always On social media content
The initial step was to create a library of content to for local European markets to populate their social media under the hashtag #FANTAxYOU.
Our ‘Always On’ strategic principle was “like it’s made by you”: lower the production threshold so that anything created by Fanta looked like something a teen could create, modelling the idea that Fanta was an brand that was in the hands of the audience by way of an invitation to get involved yourself.
Across 2 years, we created 100s of very silly, very lo-fi, content. All very professionally produced, of course - it was still within Fanta brand guidelines, hitting strategic messaging such as product or brand intrinsics.
Honestly, we created tons of this stuff.
We would often need to hit calendar moments (like Easter, or summer time), or represent whimsical micro-campaigns (like Make Your Mouth Funner, above left).
In reality, we learned that a lot of the content that an audience produces in a UGC campaign was difficult to repost on Fanta’s own brand channels, either for legal reasons or for brand communication reasons, so the lo-fi content served to set the tone for larger, more controlled UGC campaigns spread through the calendar.
Results? After the first year we’d doubled our objectives.
Ad relevance 54% up.
Ad persuasion 59% up.
Teen penetration rose 3.3% across all 12 European markets.
Volume sales increased 3.7% YOY
Also FANTAxYOU earned over 92m social impressions, and 10s of 1000s of UGC were created.
Footnote The French Fanta team made a YouTube reality show out of FANTAxYOU where videomakers were made to live in a house and coached to make adverts for Fanta. The winner got to shoot the Halloween TV commercial for France.
It went so well that it lead to two sequels over the 3 years, causing a minor controversy and inspiring some serious clapbacks and parody versions. I’ve just recently discovered this, and I’m delighted.
Credits
Agency: Movement
Creative Direction & Strategy: Mark Freeman
Experience Director: Tim Ash
Creatives: Tom Shelton, Mike Stone, Lewis Peat, Ryan Cheshire, Fiona Hutchison, Billy Osborne
Acknowledgment to all the agencies around Europe who activated elements of the campaign, including Ogilvy Berlin & McCann Madrid, and Universal McCann who led the media strategy.