So over the past few weeks we would have all seen Coca Cola bottles flooding the stores with peoples names on them.
You would go into a store and see James, John, Sarah on labels with an emphasis to share a coke then them.
This was then followed up by a TVC campaign shown in prime time slots:
Further to the TV campaign we saw outdoor billboards with random names start showing up around popular areas in Australia:
Billboard campaign
The link up was also seen on social media with a full take over on the Coca Cola Australia Facebook page:
coca-cola-facebook
This is not where the fun stopped, every one rushed on to Facebook to then post about the campaign, if some one was drinking a coke and it had a friends name on it then they instantly tagged the friend on the coke bottle.
The names are not just traditional names, Coke has added a huge range of names to the campaign such as Kaila, over 150 different names have been added to labels:
Share a coke
Even on nights out people are sharing the coke story on Facebook here is “Alex” tagged in a shot mixing Jim Bean and Cola.
share a coke
The only thing I saw with the campaign which was a bit funny was linking up the Facebook page to the Google paid search element, Something we have tested a few times in the past and it is not the best method to use in my opinion.
I feel linking up the official site (example – www.cocacola.com.au/shareacoke) and not the Facebook page would have been a smarter move, I wonder what the issues with quality score will be on this page?
Also making a micro site is not something I really like to see brands doing, the coke micro site links directly back to the Facebook page (www.shareacoke.com.au).
Marketing teams will say, hey why is it bad to link up to the micro site or Facebook campaign?
The answer is that if you want to build a huge number of links from the offline campaign to assist a long term SEO effort on the website. When the campaign is over you will see reep the benefits from all the links which are pointing to the website. Why build all these links to a different channel such as the Facebook page! You can easily build all the social elements out on the dedicated sub folder page.
But in the end of the day I feel the whole campaign is targeting a Facebook share element, so SEO would probably be an after thought.
coke-google-search
Overall this seems to be a great campaign, linking up traditional offline methods such as product branding and then emphasizing a share element on social media sites with friends.
Please post your comments on the campaign below:
