Punks and yodelers, hippies and conservatives, Austrian and Swiss fans -- Coke would bring them all together for the first time! StudiVZ, Germany’s largest, homegrown social community (with 4x as many users as Facebook in Germany!) served as the basis for our campaign. We set up the Mismatch Generator on the Coke Euro Cup platform, and challenged fans to a brave and exciting experience – meeting their exact opposites. Viral advertising in the community, as well as personally addressed email advertising and standard online advertising, drove users to the Coke site. After answering a lifestyle questionnaire, participants received three “mis-matches” each week, with whom they could correspond. Each week, a mismatched couple won a set of tickets to the Euro Cup final. Here these two opposites, who had never personally met and were completely different in the lifestyles, could finally meet and together cheer on their teams.

The “Mismatch Generator” was famous right from the start. We won more than 9x the participants of an average StudiVZ action, and broke our own Coke record with 5x as many participants as previous Coke social community campaigns. Cost per activation broke all Coke records -- index 41 (!) vs average Coca-Cola campaigns. The campaign also generated almost 1 billion ad contacts in the target group – and even more free PR contacts in coverage of the campaign. Coca-Cola had the highest awareness and likeability of all EURO2008 advertisers, and the brand enjoyed a substantial sales uplift as a result.