Sprite wanted to touch young adults aged 20 to 39, younger members of the Japanese youth looking for active experiences and to express their sense of self-identity. These people proactively seek out information relevant to them and are deeply connected into social networks, paying close attention to their friends’ statuses.
Sprite was looking to communicate a message of “breakthrough refreshment” but also to create a branded experience that would resonate with its target audience and communicate a feeling more lasting and three-dimensional. We wanted to tailor a unique, never before seen brand experience for Sprite to create a more meaningful connection than ever before in the local soft drink market.
We hit upon the idea of sudden refreshment experiences and commissioned the creation of a Splash Vending Machine. This let consumers engage with Sprite’s sense of refreshment literally through a splash of water emitted from a huge vending machine embedding the brand message within a real experience.
The machines showed up across Japan at famous amusement parks, a music festival, and in the middle of a crowded city. People started expressing their wishes through Facebook and Twitter that these machines would show up in their hometowns.
While we were setting up these real life brand experiences, we employed new technologies that could create these sudden refreshment experiences virtually, through an online surprise, making sure we were connecting with people both on and off line.
We created a “bullet time movie” – a widely recognized camera technique popularized in the Matrix movies – that allowed the people having their photo taken to change the angle and rotation of the lens every try to make it seem as if time has stopped. We set up 25 cameras in front of our SVMs at the events we rolled them out at and our audience could direct how they wanted their “refreshment moment” captured, ensuring further live interactions with the machines.
This movie connected offline and online experiences. The cameras at the SVM machines took a series of pictures that a newly developed IT system combined instantly into one real time bullet movie. The movies were publically available. Users could manipulate the videos, stopping in on and rotating any particular scene. They could share their own “refreshment moment” of their favorite moments from the site via any social network.
The raw figures speak directly to how indelibly this brand experience tied Sprite’s brand messages to its target audience. We reached one million people with the campaign, three times the amount of people accessed through our last campaign for Sprite in Japan. The videos on YouTube were watched over five million times. Seventeen TV programs, 289 websites and two newspapers covered our campaign off their own devices. By campaigns end we’d driven Sprite’s sales to double-digit growth in the 6.3 percent growth of the entire carbonated beverage market.
By allowing people to physically experience its message of refreshment we were able to succeed in outstanding growth.
- UM(strategy / connection plan)
- McCann(site planning)
- amana(site creation)