Coke Zero has made a lot of progress in recent years convincing a broader audience to try its no sugar product. But there’s still a large amount of people who refuse to believe they’ll enjoy the taste. We realized that great taste can’t always be “sold”. Instead of trying to convince people through traditional messaging, Coke Zero set out to drive trial and brand affinity with an innovative approach that would let the product “speak for itself”.

In order to let the product speak for itself, we needed to take a closer look at what it was saying. To do this, we captured 100,000 high-resolution images of the condensation, bubbles and fizz of a Coke Zero, and trained an AI model to find letters within the product. Once these letters were found, we could see what Coke Zero was trying to communicate, letting the great taste of the product speak for itself.

Coke Sans Sugar is a tasty typeface, captured using a proprietary neural network objection detection technology. It was developed to let Coke Zero’s great taste “speak for itself” in multiple languages and was leveraged as the key visual for a global advertising campaign. To develop the typeface authentically, 100,000 photos of bubbles in the liquid, fizz in the glass and condensation on the can and bottle were taken. Neural Network Object Detection Model YOLO was then trained to find shapes within these images, which were selected and stored into a dataset. This dataset consisted of more than 40 million individual shapes that resembled letters across a range of languages.

Coke Sans Sugar is a tasty typeface, captured using a proprietary neural network objection detection technology. It was developed to let Coke Zero’s great taste “speak for itself” in multiple languages and was leveraged as the key visual for a global advertising campaign. To develop the typeface authentically, 100,000 photos of bubbles in the liquid, fizz in the glass and condensation on the can and bottle were taken. As the imagery was collected, it was compiled into a dataset, where custom software then recognised letters from the alphabets of hundreds of different languages. This was then shipped to dozens of Coke markets as a typography toolkit for their marketing teams to use in a wide array of outdoor placements globally.

Coke Sans Sugar has been globally adopted and is currently placed into a range of executions, from digital banners to static billboards, around the world. The innovative typography has been globally praised by design publications and advertising media outlets, and due to its success, the typeface will also be used in all key visuals for not just this year’s global campaign, but for all the 2025 advertising communications as well. The work ultimately allowed us to convey the product in its rawest, most authentic form, as a means of driving consumer trial thanks to its taste appeal.