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

For this final launch of 2023, Coca-Cola® identified an opportunity in technology to provide the deserving climax for Creations - the divisive debate on AI.

AI had solidly dominated headlines for most of 2023, with sentiment varying from deeply dystopian to wildly utopian. Most brands' attempts to jump on the AI bandwagon were often perceived as gimmicky and self-serving.

So how could we create an experience that would add to the conversation, while giving Coca-Cola®'s point of view on it in a relevant, desirable and meaningful way, and emerge on the right side of culture?

As AI’s role in advertising/marketing is ever-evolving, we wanted to make sure that our campaign helped a historic brand like Coca-Cola venture into launching their biggest AI-centric campaign at a global level, meaning we had to navigate various legal regulation frameworks that differed by region and even on a country level. This required a very tight partnership between marketing and legal teams to ensure we could deliver a consistent, fun yet accessible user experience to the masses whilst maintaining privacy, fairness, transparency, and accountability in how the digital experience was executed. Such stringent requirements ensured that both the creative idea and execution were not burdened by any unnecessary features and complexities, making the experience a simple yet elegant one, allowing the most number of people to access AI through the product.

Coca-Cola® Creations is all about product innovation that invites young people to try Coke for the first time. We knew we had to create a story that was intriguing, exciting and differentiated from the dystopian AI talk that hogs headlines.

Coca-Cola® Y3000 - the first Coke flavor to give everyone a taste of the future - was born.

Combining human creativity and artificial intelligence, we explored unique ways to bring to life this futuristic world filled with positivity and optimism - tapping into people’s imagination about what that world could look like.

So we partnered with an AI from the Year 3000 to help Gen Z look into the future with positivity, giving Gen Z a Real Magic experience to see, taste, and experience the future with AI like never before.

Coca-Cola® Y3000, was launched in more than 30 markets globally. Beyond giving people a chance to taste the future, we created an easy and accessible way for people to travel to the future and see the Year 3000 - regardless of where they were based.

Together with our Y3000 AI, we created the Y3000 AI Cam - an exciting way for people to see the future, and create their version of an optimistic future.

Accessed through a QR code on the pack label, we put the power of Gen AI into everyone’s hands. The whole experience was designed to look and feel visually seamless, from the moment you scan the product to the final depiction of the future you would get from Y3000 AI.

This allowed people all around the world to transform their surroundings into a Y3000 world - fuelling their imagination about a positive future.

Y3000 placed Coca-Cola at the heart of culture:

- #1 AdAge AI Activation of 2023.

- 5.2 billion earned media impressions, the highest Coke Creations ever (2.5x vs second highest).

- 1952 media placements from cultural tastemakers like Hypebeast, Highsnobiety, NYLON, I-D Magazine, and Hypebae and in top news outlets like CNN, People, Fortune and CNBC.

- Y3000 CAM was the most socially shared Coke Creations digital experience ever.

Reached a new younger audience with:

- 12 million influencer content views and 658k video content views.

- 250K unique Y3000 visions generated.

- Reached a new younger audience with 260mil+ total discussions generated amongst Gen Z with #Y3000 in Greater China alone.

Drove interest for the brand with 693k new visitors to Coke hub.