As it is across the world, Christmas in Russia is celebrated with the tradition of giving gifts to those we love. However, at the end of 2016 people could not afford to splurge on presents, especially Russia’s youth.

Research revealed that 76% were saving money, 80% said that now is not good for purchasing the things they want and 69% were uncertain about their future financial state. It was clear that people needed to experience the magic of Christmas and the return of the holiday mood.

Starting out with a simple insight, that the joy of gifting is in the expression of care rather than the monetary value, our idea was to offer a simple gift that people could engage with and share – for free.

We brought Christmas to consumers in a never-seen-before interactive digital experience with a virtual ‘Santa Bot’, including virtual presents, to energise and delight Russia’s youth.

Santa Bot was fully interactive, engaged in live conversation with users, offered up games, jokes and Coca-Cola branded Christmas content.

Users could win ‘Social Stickers’, widely used in communication within the VK social network, but that usually require payment. The more people interacted with Santa and solved fun tasks, the more sticker packs they could get to send to friends, adding to the excitement and social sharing of the campaign.

On the last days leading up to Christmas, Santa Bot enabled users to send their loved ones a personalized music greeting card featuring our famous Coca-Cola song. Sung by a top Russian pop-artist, we had the artist record 540 names so users could send the song with a personal touch.

Over a 3-week period, the campaign was promoted via VK internal promotion and our greeting card pop-artist’s social pages, generating incredible scale - attracting 10.8 million users!

We reached 74% of our target audience and in just 3 weeks 10.8 million unique users rushed to use Santa Bot - surpassing our KPI by 40%.

156 million Christmas Stickers were sent and 282 million messages were sent in total, an average of 27 messages per user.

The Coca-Cola Christmas Song became the most viewed video on VK of 2016 and 8.6 million personalized greeting cards were created.

53 million virtual Coca-Cola branded gifts were given away, cementing Coca-Cola’s association with all things Christmas.

Coca-Cola’s social community on VK grew almost 5 times, even though becoming a member of group was not required to use Santa Bot, to become the #1 branded community within the social network.

Most importantly, Coca-Cola brought back festive fun for the youth of Russia and sent seasonal cheer across the country.