Faced with the problem of securing the next generation of consumers, “Say it with a Song” was the summer campaign developed for the Coca-Cola Central South Europe (CSE) to address this issue. Securing the love of a generation that has a spending power of more than 80$ billion in Europe alone was a crucial aspect in reaching our objectives.

The campaign leveraged on music’s ability to convey emotions and feelings and gave birth to the emotisong, a 100% original music format designed form the beginning to prompt conversations across social platforms.

But making innovation an integral part of teens’ digital diets was not something that we could achieve overnight. We needed a good entry point, something or someone that would get teens’ attention and at the same time validate the solution as “the IT thing. So we decided to drive word of mouth through a network of ambassadors in each of our CSE key markets. This provided the right momentum to propel the campaign forward and make it one of the most notable in social during summer 2014.

The development of the new music format allowed Coca-Cola to become an integral part of teens’ conversations. Combined with a variety of offline and online activations that relied a lot on the power of the music icons whose songs we were tapping into, the campaign strengthened brand love and brought growth in consumption inside a descending category.

Thanks to carefully targeted offline and online activations the campaign generated unprecedented digital engagement results.

The campaign was first outlined centrally, with an unique influencer engagement strategy: recruiting bloggers, musicians, celebrities - key teen influencers, in each of the markets. Their task was dual: to raise awareness for the new format and help educate teens into the different ways in which both the packs and the emotisong platform could be used. To build anticipation, the influencers first came to stage in late June where packs were not yet available in markets. By July everybody was asking where to get the packs. On July 1st the emotisong packages were launched across the region.

Building on that wave of anticipation, events- ranging from open air concerts to special music driven samplings and activations, were designed to further enhance awareness and raise the online footprint of the campaign.

On a market level local teams were tasked with setting up the right line-up of influencers to drive the message.

Over the summer of 2014 the campaign made Coca-Cola a part of teen culture and conversations. Digital engagement was unprecedented, surpassing by far the numbers of 2013’s Share a Coke in CSE – which had previously set the historic highs on that front. Number of visits to platform were up by 80% vs. PY and the campaign generated ONE BILLION earned impressions (9 times the CSE average) results driven by influencer strategy. In addition to this, we managed to make this a mobile led campaign- with 55% of the visits coming in via a mobile device.

Favorite NARTD brand score on total population raised by 2% vs. PY in all CSE market. The association between Coca-Cola and Music grew 1.6% for teens in all CSE markets. On top, across the entire CSE business unit, average number of drinks per week grew by 9%. 99% of comments were positive