It’s Not Your Fault
Coke Zero
Issue 27 | June 2013
Agency
Droga5
Creative Team
Creative Chairman David Droga Executive Creative Directors Ted Royer Nik Studzinski Creative Directors Tim Gordon Amanda Clelland Stan Chin Art Director Kevin Weir Copywriter Chris Colliton Senior Interactive Designer Kathrin Laser Senior Designer Mark Yoon
Production Team
Head Of Integrated Production Sally-Ann Dale Agency Producer Sam Kilbreth
Other Credits
Group Brand Strategy Director Tom Naughton Head Of Digital Strategy Chet Gulland Senior Digital Strategist Dan Neumann Digital Strategist Eric Tsai Group Account Director Nick Phelps Account Director Matt Hennell Account Manager Patrick Givens
Date
March, 2013
Background
Coke Zero recognised that there are times when men do wrong. Filling out brackets instead of working, playing video games and forgetting to pick up the in-laws from the airport, putting off chores to watch basketball, the average Joe cannot help but do these things.
Coke Zero wanted to let him know it was not his fault. The campaign set out to educate him, and the world, that distractions were designed to be distracting.
Idea
‘It’s not your fault’ is a witty creative platform campaign launched during the NCAA Tournament (aka March Madness), a captivating sports event man was powerless to ignore.
TV ads absolved man of his most famous faults. Seven web films followed, each one focused on a specific instance when man got in trouble while watching basketball. The web films were accompanied by radio spots and a 34-page PDF document hosted on SlideShare.net, which helped guys explain to their bosses, in a language they could understand, why they couldn’t stop watching basketball.
The campaign also included partnerships with Conan O’Brien, Bleacher Report and a takeover of the March Madness Live App. In the end, men understood that while they may not be able to stop getting in trouble, at least they now had a defender.
Results
The ‘It’s not your fault’ campaign became the undisputed talk of March Madness, and “Bracket” was named the number one spot of the tournament.
The campaign further resulted in:
- 60% increase in exposure for Coke Zero during the tournament
- 136% increase in positive mentions
- 86% increase in Coke Zero Twitter followers
- 68,000 new Coke Zero Facebook fans
- Over 70,000 views of the 34-page document, including over 10,000 in the first 24 hours
- 2+ million media impressions of ‘Bracket’
- Coke Zero named Yahoo’s March Madness winner.
All this in just one month.
Our Thoughts
For us at Directory, innovation is when you do something no-one has ever done before. So we get excited by new technology when it allows advertisers and creative people to bring brands and people together in new ways and in new places. But we also get excited when we see creative people use old formats in new and unexpected ways.
So, we love the innovative use of SlideShare here. Plugging in to the basketball season was a straightforward sort of strategy. ‘It’s not your fault’ is a witty creative platform. But getting 70,000 people to look at a Powerpoint presentation in PDF form, now that’s new, different and ingenious. And we love it.