Share a Coke has been one of Coca-Cola’s most successful marketing platforms since 2011, but we needed to keep the idea still fresh and effective half a decade later.

To make Share a Coke fresh again for Chinese teens who culturally prefer waters, teas, and local brands would require a completely new approach. And with no new news, it would be an exceptionally difficult task to come up with a campaign idea for 2017 that could cut through the summer clutter.

For 2017, Coca-Cola had two underlying challenges:

1. Increase brand love to exceed 2016’s historic high (+6%)

2. Grow volume by at least 6% to double the success of 2016 and steal back share other beverages

For Share a Coke, the idea was the bottle. Hundreds of millions of them, seen by hundreds of millions of teens, all summer long. After co-creating codes with teen influencers, we designed fun illustrations around them to help teens decipher their meanings while connecting with each other. These 80 codes were launched with a TVC alongside an LBS digital activation that invited teens to connect and share the code.

For example, 521 pronounced “Wu Er Yi” sounds like “Wo Ai Ni” or “I love you” in Chinese. To illustrate love, we drew two characters sharing a can of Coca-Cola. For 2333, we created three 3s ‘Laughing Out Loud’ together.

Gibberish to you? That’s the point. It was a meaningful campaign for teens, that only they could understand and connect with using Coca-Cola.