The sales figures of orange flavored soft drinks had been declining across the board in Finland, and Fanta needed a boost for the crucial summer period of 2018.

Our brief was to drive the sales figures by reclaiming Fanta’s relevance among Finnish teens. We needed to create something that would engage teens in such depths we hadn’t seen in previous campaigns.

In addition to driving sales, our objective for the campaign was to have positive impact on the most important brand attributes for Fanta, which were “Fanta is a fun brand” and “Fanta is always trying new things”. These served as the basis for planning the campaign.

With “Message In A Fanta”, we wanted to create an innovative social experience that included using influencers in a completely unique way and utilizing Instagram Live at the core of the campaign.

We collaborated with three popular Finnish influencers who bravely let themselves be surprised simultaneously on Instagram Live by a Message In A Fanta, a note stuffed inside a Fanta bottle, that included a challenge they needed to solve together with their fans in just 15 minutes.

This resulted in spontaneous (and hilarious) live content that engaged the audience as never before. When the influencers’ live feeds shut down, we edited together the highlights and amplified the whole thing with paid advertising to reach the whole target audience.

We knew that teens are increasingly harder to reach and engage with in today's media landscape. Our own research study CCS (Consumer Connection Survey) gave us two powerful insights to work with.

Firstly, CCS confirmed that Instagram is the most important social media platform for Fanta's target group. With the emergence of the different Instagram features, mainly Stories and Live, we wanted to carve out our own space and find some uncharted territory within the app for creation of branded content.

Secondly, another over-indexing CSS insight stated that 27 % of teens actually say that influencers promoting products have strong positive impact on their purchase behavior.

These insights led us to create a campaign that combined using Instagram Live, influencers, in an innovative concept that highlighted collaboration between the influencers and their fans, all happening live in a Fanta-branded environment.

Throughout the summer we sent out mysterious messages to our influencers in the form of small notes stuffed inside Fanta bottles. At prearranged moments all three influencers launched into an Instagram Live and opened up the message at the same exact time.

The notes contained challenges where the influencers had to create, for example, a Fanta catapult, a Fanta pet or a Fanta house of cards, using items from a special Fanta DYI construction kit.

The influencers asked their fans for help and the comments kept pouring in. Some fans were even invited to join them on the stream via a shared screen. After finalizing the challenge, the influencer asked the fans to vote for the most creative achievement on Fanta’s Instagram channel. We also created additional assets of the highlights of the live stream so the fans who missed out still had a taste of the action.

The campaign resulted in a completely new level of fan interaction, but it also exceeded the commercial goals. ?

Business Results:?

Sales + 8,6 % (Objective 5 %)

Brand/Communication Results:?

Unaided Brand Awareness +9,2 % (Objective 5 %)

Brand attribute: Fanta is a fun brand: +2 % (Objective 1 %)

Brand attribute: Fanta is always trying out new things: +3,8 % (Goal 1 %)?

Media Results:?

Reach of influencers’ live streams: 85 000

Effective reach in target group: Approx. 82 %

Engagement: 447 000 engagements in Fanta’s Instagram channel, a huge number compared that we have little over 400 000 teens in Finland?

5,4 M impressions (Finland inhabits 5,5 M people)

Sources:

Sales data from The Coca-Cola Company

Brand tracking: Brand Guidance System (Millward-Brown)?