In 2019, the Coca-Cola Christmas Truck was going to tour around Finland for the second time ever. The debut tour the previous year had already been a success, but now Coca-Cola wanted to strengthen the brand’s ownership on Christmas by making this year’s campaign extra special.

Our brief was to ramp up interest towards the Christmas Truck tour – to make it seem as alluring as the inaugural tour. The last stop on the tour itinerary was left open and instead of just picking the logistically suitable city to fill it, we were asked to use this opportunity to find a creative solution that would bring extra hype for the whole tour.

Our business objective was to increase Coca-Cola’s brand equity and drive consumption in the core target group, teens of age 13 to 19.

As the last stop of the tour itinerary was open, our idea was to have five Finnish cities compete against each other to determine who would receive a visit from the Coca-Cola Christmas Truck.

As full believers on the emotional power of music, and thus cooperating with Spotify, we chose the competition mechanism to be based on the amount of Christmas tunes streamed per city. Whoever would start raising the city’s collective Christmas spirit through music the most, would be granted a visit from the Coca-Cola Christmas Truck.

To support the competition, we used streaming data provided by Spotify, to create PR angles and content for social media based on the regional Christmas music streaming habits. The collaboration marked also a global first for Spotify, as their streaming data was used in a completely new way to engage listeners on and off the platform together with another brand.

Coca-Cola has a long history of using music as part of their iconic marketing – just say the words “Holidays are coming” and see if a melody appears in your mind.

In order to leverage the importance of music into the Finnish Christmas Truck campaign, Coca-Cola decided to dig in deeper with help from Spotify.

On Coca-Cola’s request, Spotify looked back into the streaming data from the previous Christmas which showed that the bond Finns have with Christmas music is strong. According to the listening habits, Finns start listening to Christmas songs really, really early, already in November, way earlier than most countries.

The strategy was to strengthen the link between Coca-Cola and Christmas by activating Finns to begin streaming Christmas music in a Coke-branded environment, thus prolonging the festive season and increasing the sales of Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola Finland created a brand profile on Spotify and curated five city-specific playlists full of local and global Christmas classics.

Starting in mid-November 2019 and by using targeted messaging on Spotify and other social media platforms, the people of the regions were driven to listen to their playlist and at the end, the city with the most followed playlist received a visit from the Christmas Truck.

The campaign also included a complete take-over of the Spotify experience in audio, banners, other sponsored playlists and home page takeover placements.

The streaming data also provided the campaign with regional insight pin-pointing differences between cities in terms of top artists and songs. This gave fodder for local PR and social media assets that played a big part in tuning minds into the Christmas spirit.

The campaign delivered in all aspects, by driving consumer engagement, building key brand metrics and delivering solid sales and market share growth.

Business results (compared to year before)

Results from Nielsen Homescan:

• House-hold penetration: +2.2 ppt

CokeTM Brand metrics (Teens 13-19, compared to year before)

• For Someone Like Me +19 %

• Brand I Love +15 %

• Great Tasting +38 %

Thousands of Spotify users followed the city-specific playlists and the amount of streams rose to the levels of the most popular featured playlists on Spotify’s home page.

The event held in the winning city, Forssa, turned out to be the most successful of the whole tour as almost 30 % of the whole population of the city turned up.

The campaign was also picked up by multiple national news outlets with over 100 media hits.