Coca-Cola is all about bringing people together and bridging divides. The Global pandemic created the complete opposite - a world where people felt more isolated than ever before.

We found a way to bring people together again and grow diminishing user engagement and sales which were on the decline as a result of various hard lock-downs from Covid.

Music is a key passion point for our core target market of teens and young adults. We wanted to reconnect our consumers by using the power of music. One Coke can at a time.

So we took the 4 main components of music; the Beat, Melody, Lyric, and Effect, and created 40 unique phrases that when put together worked in 1000’s of combinations, creating over 10,000 songs, all without 1 single instrument.

We turned everyday phrases into phonetic sounds and put them on Coke cans so that everyone could make music by simply picking up a Coca-Cola and saying the phrase a few times.

Each BeatCan took you to a tutorial that not only taught you the sound, but showed how you could make music with your crew, by combining the 4 different elements together.

Coca-Cola gave us the challenge of a transactional brief that would help sell Coke, uplift teens and connect them during the pandemic using music.

Teens are constructing and testing their identities, in this process belonging and acceptance are important. They will gravitate towards opportunities that help them attain these things.

Music is one of these spaces. However, it’s a space cluttered by brands in Africa through sponsorship and streaming. Teens are simply consumers in this relationship, the process of getting this music is not an uplifting exchange in and of itself.

We wanted to create an experience around music that would allow teens to become co-creators, helping them demonstrate their identity and create a sense of belonging in this process. Leading to the creative challenge: Find a way to make a can of Coke a way for teens to show and share their beat with Africa.

We worked with the South African Beatbox Champion, Seth Mckinnon, to create unique phrases that went onto our Coca-Cola packs. Each phrase created either a Beat, Melody, Effect or Lyric simply by repeating the word a few times.

With these phonetic phrases, we turned billboards into music sheets, created an AR lens that turned your phone into a studio by seamlessly looping all of our sounds, and sent DJ’s, influencers and local musicians our limited edition BeatBox to get them to spread the word.

The BeatCan campaign ran in 4 African countries: South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya and Uganda across a variety of media; in-store, radio, outdoor, social & digital on all local Coca-Cola Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook pages.

The campaign was live from 24th April to 24th August 2021 across multiple platforms.

The Coca-Cola BeatCan Campaign was hugely successful in terms of user engagement and sales. Our campaign went live during some of South Africa's hardest lockdowns in 2021.

We had to stop all of our online marketing owing to a failed insurrection and violent civil unrest - specifically in South Africa, in July/August 2021 – right in the middle of our campaign.

Despite these challenges, the campaign resulted in a huge 17% increase in sales overall in 2021, as well as a massive increase of 77% increase in Brand Love.

Our consumers spent over 2.3 million minutes spend watching our tutorials online and created thousands of user-generated songs that were shared on social platforms. We were also trending on Twitter in our first week of launch.

All this for a campaign that ran during Winter, which is traditionally Coca-Cola’s lowest performing period - resulting in a campaign that surpassed all expectations.