A campaign by UM Sydney for Coca-Cola South Pacific has won the inaugural Warc Prize for Connection Strategy Grand Prix.
The #colouryoursummer campaign featured a new range of smaller 250ml cans that were made available in a limited-edition range of colours that teenagers could collect and share.
“This connections strategy put Coca-Cola’s owned assets at the heart of the campaign (the coloured cans) and through a connected system of OESP touch points we gave teens the opportunity to unlock the cans to discover a colourful world of content, experiences and prizes – resulting in sales 27% above forecast, ” said Sophie Price, Chief Strategy Officer, UM Australia.
“This type of connections thinking is only made possible by collaborating with partner agencies,” she added, “so we want to also acknowledge the teams at Ogilvy Sydney and Satellite Media.”
That sentiment was echoed by Leo Roberts, GMM Integrated Marketing Communications, Coca-Cola South Pacific, who said: “The campaign and its success are the result of a huge amount of hard work from all of our agencies and our internal cross-functional teams.”
He also said the campaign exemplified many of the principle that underpinned Coca-Cola’s approach to communications planning.
“The strong link from insight and strategy to execution, the importance of owned media, the fact that it is inherently participative, the integrated nature of the overall plan and the manner in which it encourages consumers to discover more and more elements are all fundamentals of what we believe makes for great marketing communications in the modern age.”
With the Australian summer nearing, Coca-Cola has just begun the next phase of the campaign – introducing packaging that changes colour and tells consumers when the product is perfectly chilled.
Aaron Fetters, the chair of the judging panel and svp/Marketing Solutions at comScore, was effusive about Coke’s #colouryoursummer.
“This submission and the underlying campaign masterfully demonstrated structured objectives and tangible goals, and followed through by delivering real results,” he said.
“Their integration of touchpoints and channels was particularly evident and as a result our judges chose this work for not only the Grand Prix but also our special award for Paid, Owned, Earned connectivity.”
Speaking more generally, Fetters said that “the submissions for this year’s Warc Prize for Connection Strategy were truly inspirational … So many of these submissions demonstrated incredible creativity, strategy and results.
Details of all the winners can be seen on the Prize website, where Warc subscribers can read the case studies in full.
Warc will also publish an analysis of all entries to the competition, assessing trends and drawing lessons for marketers.
