Coca-Cola’s biggest marketing challenge is maintaining relevance with Gen Z. To recruit young consumers, Coca-Cola taps into their most relevant passion points, including gaming. For this audience, sparkling soft drink consumption and gaming go hand-in-hand: 68% of Gen Z regularly consume non-alcoholic drinks while gaming.

That’s why Coca-Cola has been present in some of gaming’s key moments – growing its credibility and relevance year by year, region by region, through iconic partnerships with publishers, influencers and esport orgs. And in 2022, Coca-Cola formed its biggest partnership yet - with one of the most important players in the gaming industry, Riot Games, for their newly released mobile smash hit League of Legends: Wild Rift. With the increased accessibility (provided by mobile devices) creating a heavily Gen Z player-base, Wild Rift was a perfect match for Coca-Cola.

The Coca-Cola: Play As One creative idea acted as a rallying cry to not only unite the global Wild Rift community, but also champion those key community figures and influencers that always go out of their way to collaborate and support. Across our three iconic moments, Play As One acted as a unified global platform that celebrated togetherness as the real victory within Wild Rift.

To bring this idea to life, we created the first ever global influencer squad for Wild Rift and Riot Games – featuring 12 unique influencers from around the world, united by their love for the game, culture & community, and acting as a physical manifestation of the Play As One ethos. For the first time ever – through Play As One and our global influencer squad - Wild Rift transcended the game world, dominated gaming culture, and crossed geographical and audience boundaries.

Coca-Cola knows that in Wild Rift, and in gaming more broadly, the real victory comes from teamwork and togetherness. And in gaming, togetherness doesn’t just come from playing the game – it occurs across a game’s entire ecosystem, from streaming & content creation, to watching esports, to attending conventions and beyond. And as a brand that celebrates the real magic of human connection, Coca-Cola was perfectly poised to bring the global Wild Rift community together like never before.

Our strategy was to elevate our three iconic moments to create new communal experiences that transcended boundaries and globally united players and fans alike. Through a variety of gaming-authentic touchpoints we would reward teamwork and collaboration, celebrate the unsung heroes holding the community together, and unite fans with the Wild Rift players and creators they idolize.

Coca-Cola was provided with three key activation moments from their partnership with Riot Games: the in-game event, the community tournament in Brazil, and the LoL: Worlds Fan Fest in South Korea. While each activation moment was unique, we knew that consistency and commitment resonate deeply with gamers, and so our ambition was to elevate each moment through one singular unified approach and in a way that only Coca-Cola can: with the creative idea Play As One.

This meant that while each moment differed in execution type, Coca-Cola was consistently seen to be celebrating togetherness and collaboration across platforms, throughout the community, and within the culture.

We set out to drive cultural resonance among the gaming community and we succeeded massively; building on decades worth of credibility with a world-first partnership and activation:

- First ever in-game branded event for Wild Rift

- 266M impressions from the in-game event

- Historic 99% reward redemption rate

- 11M in-game Coca-Cola rewards unlocked

- 4M unique fans reached through Brazil tournament

- Local BR legend @Tealz broke his streaming record – and was promoted to Twitch partner after the event

- 6M fans reached through LoL: Worlds content