The soft drink market is saturated and youth today have never had more choices. For an iconic brand like Coca-Cola®, that's been around since 1886, the challenge was to create desirability, build affinity and ultimately drive consumption with this demanding audience.

For this final launch of 2022, Coca-Cola® identified an opportunity in anime to provide the deserving climax for Creations’ debut in youth culture - Anime's most anticipated return, ‘BLEACH Thousand-Year Blood War’.

Chatter on this release had been building for the past year within the global anime community. It was clear fans were deeply vested in a release that was 10 years in the making - the last thing they would tolerate would be a generic marketing campaign by a global brand capitalizing on fandom for profit.

So how could the most mainstream brand participate in this monumental moment in a relevant, desirable and meaningful way inside culture?

The central theme of BLEACH is the characters’ journey to discover and unlock the truest and most powerful versions of their physical, emotional, and spiritual self, as represented by the iconic power unleashed by the characters’ swords.

We coined an original name to represent this - ‘Soul Blast’, and created a surround-sound brand experience designed to put Real Magic into the hands of young people to not only taste the action but to unlock the ultimate versions of themselves via touch-point experiences with this final limited edition drop.

This was a fan-first approach that was rooted at the heart of the long-standing appeal of BLEACH, conceptualized to drive deep engagement with Gen Zs, instead of simply slapping characters on cans and replicating this across marketing materials in a generic superficial fashion.

Partnerships and collaborations have already made it into mainstream marketing. We had to push harder to place Coca-Cola® at the leading edge of culture;

1. Activating Coca-Cola® in anime, a fast-growing, highly engaged community, beyond the usual suspects of music or fashion.

2. Partnering with an anime IP making a comeback, prioritizing cultural cache over the reach guaranteed by the most popular IP of 2022.

With the partnership in place, we then rooted this Creation in the unique appeal of anime to Gen Zs. While the core themes of action and friendship are instrumental in anime, the emergent theme of self-exploration is why anime was fast gaining fandom in the cultural mainstream.

Drawn to the multi-layered journey of self-exploration in anime, Gen Z engages with anime to explore and unlock more of who they really are. This insight led to the creation of our 'Soul Blast' experience.

This Asia-led drop took the cultural insight around Gen Zs engagement with anime to explore and unlock more of who they really are, developing an exclusive fan-first approach to engage and drive sales through strategic touch-points over a 2-3 month marketing window.

The limited edition product design, with its intense new look and ‘Action’ flavour exploded into markets via social, e-commerce, and partnerships with something special for fans to discover - their very own ‘Soul Blast’.

An immersive on-pack mobile AR game (built using Play Canvas and 8th Wall), unlocked special power-ups unique to BLEACH characters. Fans got a taste of the action, by unleashing their powers and smashing evil orbs to evolve their blasts, sharing their scores, and redeeming rewards.

Exclusive O2O retail, promotion, and merchandise partnerships helped recruit millions of fans - new and old, to be part of one of the biggest brand collaborations in anime history.

Earned reach & talkability, placing Coca-Cola at the heart of culture:

Earned media impressions - 1.3B

Trended on social media - top 5 on Twitter Japan, top 10 on BiliBili

200M+ views on Weibo

2nd most mentioned Creations out of 5 drops in 2022

Net positive sentiment of 95%

Almost 15% of mentions are in markets where product is not available, indicating strong organic conversations

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Engaging Gen Zs, reaching a new younger audience:

75% of fans engaged under 30 years of age

Livestream peak viewership was 22x higher than average, average viewership was 15x and interaction was 11x higher than average

Recruited 77% new buyers to Coca-Cola's ecomm channels in 1st week of sales

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Business Impact, driving sell-out:

No.1 Sparkling Product in TMall China (ranked popularity)

No.1 New Product on HeMa China (sales)

10x Re-sale price outside of Asia