In 2018, Coca-Cola refreshed its global brand purpose, with the mission to bring people together through positivity.

Romania ranks amongst the top 10 unhappiest countries in the European Union. The negative conversation is affecting people so badly, that 50% of young people are considering leaving the country in the next year. Romania is the second country after Syria in terms of emigrants.

This was the perfect opportunity to launch a conversation about optimism. We needed to create a powerful awareness campaign that exposed the target audience with Coca-Cola’s new values.

A meaningful way of speaking about the brand purpose, with the product at its core.

Before we could spread optimism, we wanted to see what was making Romanians pessimistic.

What we found were the media and the press, where the negative news were largely outweighing the positive. No wonder people were becoming anxious and isolated.

So, if no media channels were reporting on good news, we invented our own.

This is how the Half Full bottle was born: the iconic Coca-Cola bottle, filled literally from the half up.

The bottle became a media outlet, with positive facts carefully selected by a team of journalists and PR printed on the back labels. Coca-Cola managed to hijack a negative conversation with a strong point of view. One that people naturally engaged with since it was based on curated positive facts.

We launched the Half Full bottles with a multi-channel campaign, activating the positive side of life in each of the communication channels.

The campaign targeted all Coca-Cola drinkers, with special focus on the young generation (18 – 30). The people who, because of the negative reporting in the media and the press, have a pessimistic outlook on life and don’t believe that positive things can happen in Romania.

A team of journalists and PR selected the most impressive news of 2018 and 2019, featuring hopeful statistics about Romania and positive stories about Romanian citizens such as Olympians, athletes and artists.

We created 1000 limited edition Half Full bottles featuring positive news about Romania.

We sent them to the top 200 Romanian influencers, out of which 67 of them joined the campaign absolutely for free, sharing the news and their own optimistic messages on their social channels.

The campaign was meant to activate positivity in Romanians through all channels, including nationwide outdoors displaying positive news, an online video and banners mirroring negative news on online news outlets. People could chat with a Facebook chatbot, personalize their own Half Full bottles and have them delivered at home, as a reminder of positivity. The messages sent by the people were also aired on a large scale digital outdoor, in the middle of Bucharest, Romania’s capital.

63% of the core target audience was reached

48% of young people who saw the campaign, interacted with the chatbot

67 top influencers answered the call and joined the campaign for free