Using data and social listening, we discovered that there was a much more interesting conversation around our fast food chain’s Coke. In fact, if you Google “that place where Coke tastes SO good,” page after page explains why the Coke tastes so good at our fast food chain. It was already a conversation in pop culture – all we had to do was shine a light on it.

We thought the best way to do this was to take the brand entirely out of the conversation with a first-of-its-kind unbranded integrated campaign. By never mentioning the brand, we could tap into second-screen curiosity, driving consumers to perform a search for “that place where Coke tastes SO good.” There’s nothing better than a third-party endorsement and there’s no bigger third-party endorsement than a Google organic search.

On April 11, 2017, we launched the “Search” campaign through a YouTube mobile masthead placement that drove consumers directly to the search results page for “that place where Coke tastes SO good.” Later that evening, during primetime television viewing hours, we began to seed the first television commercial. Throughout that first week, we released several additional television spots on broadcast, online video and a unique YouTube channel. We used the first week of the campaign to introduce people to the conversation already happening online around Coke at McDonald’s. And in the two weeks that followed, once everyone was in on the joke, we had the luxury of continuing to push our $1 Coke message by referencing our own campaign and continuing to be part of topical conversations. Throughout the three-week campaign period we also launched a series of banner ads, radio, print and social to accompany the video work.

? Nielsen Study Trial for “$1 any size” soft drinks was the highest of all previous campaigns (Source: Nielsen)

? In the first two weeks, the campaign drove an 18,400% increase in search intent (Source: Google Trends)

? There were 411,166,83 unique visits per month in earned media (Source: Muckrack)

? There were 61 articles published about the campaign (Source: Muckrack)

? We attracted 2,055 organic social campaign mentions on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook (does not include McDonald's or Mindy Kaling posts). (Source: Sprinklr)

? Our total paid social impressions were over 275.8M (Source: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)

? YouTube masthead impressions: 274M (Source: YouTube)

Total views for all “Search” campaign content – “Pixelated,” “That Place,” “Secret Identity,” “Beverage Technician,” “Search,” “Cancelled”: 4.2M (Source: YouTube)