Coca-Cola is known and beloved around the world, with its unique ideas that spread happiness.

The brand face several challenges in Puerto Rico, especially among its core target of teens and young adults. The market for teens has become especially cluttered due to increased competition from younger and “edgier” brands. The young adult segment had begun to leave the category and was not engaging positively with the brand in a social media environment that had grown increasingly critical of soft drinks.

With a limited budget, we needed to reach young consumers (13-29) and reconnect them with Coca-Cola’s values.

Research on our target’s habits revealed our key insight: Emoji have become the dominant language of the mobile age. A December 2014 study by the Global Language Monitor revealed that the Heart and Love emoji were used more than any actual 'word’ from any language.

Our strategy: The universal brand of happiness becomes the first to use Emoji in its URL.

Coca-Cola bought .WS domains for every emoji that conveyed happiness, then advertised our new web addresses on social media, outdoor, and even on our own bottles.

Custom emoji domains were created for various local celebrities and influencers, which shared with their fans on their social media and blogs. We then allowed fans to create their own custom emoji URL on our website, which they assigned to their preferred website or social account.

We also reached traditional media, tech and culture bloggers leading to widespread coverage in both local and international media.

Behind every emoji there’s a line of code called Unicode. We bought and registered URLs for every emoji that conveyed happiness. Emoji’s are not accepted on “top-level” domains such as .com, .net, and .org, we opted to go with .WS ‘We Smile.’’’ We advertised on YouTube, social media and Coca-Cola bottles.

Users who entered these URLs were taken to a landing page within Coca-Cola’s website, where they could enter a contest to win a unique emoji URL combination of their own, and assign it to the website or social media account of their choice.

A simple change of URL helped Coca-Cola far exceed its goals and inspire its audience around the world. The inclusion of emoji URLs and the possibility for users to obtain their own custom domains through Coca-Cola provided an additional incentive to share our content.

- Website visits increased over 1,000%

- 10,000 URLs requests on the site during the first 48 hours.

- Over 100 million earned impressions.

- Shared in over 120 countries.

- Covered by over 400 blogs.