Coke Zero Sugar 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 Sugar set out to drive trial and brand affinity with an innovative approach that would let 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, fizz and condensation were taken through a glass and formed into various shapes. As the imagery was collected, it was compiled into a dataset, where custom software then recognized 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.

While the clients have not yet released quantitative results (due to the campaign running for the entire direction of 2024), 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.