Making somebody happy makes you happy at the same time. This is the foundation of our theory of Quantum Happiness.

Our idea was to apply this theory to a place that sometimes lacks happiness - social media.

We did this by finding people that were spreading happiness online and encouraged them to post more of it.

We researched which topics had a high propensity for happiness on social media, and found which hashtags were associated to there topics. By tracking these hashtags, we found our happy-makers and rewarded them with a personalised, content post from Coca-Cola.

Designed with the Coke bottle as their themes, our posts ranged from images and gifs to videos - all 100% customisable, and all encouraging in nature.

For the consumer, it was a complete suprise when they received our post, and this positive reinforcement encouraged them to carry on posting happy posts.

Using the datasets of happy hashtags generated by our research, our creative team created templates for 350 responses (images, gifs, videos) that could be used to answer all eventualities.

Every day our analytics team would track our list of hashtags, and provide our social team with the details of any matches. Our social team then selected the relevant response and personalised it with the consumser's name. They then sent the message to the consumer, often with a gleeful response. We also made special care to involve the top Social personalities in the country, keeping track of their daily posts.

On average, we sent about 100 surprise posts a week, and ran our campaign for the three months leading up to the Coke Bottle's birthday.

Due to the strategic targeting of social figures with high followerships, as well as targeting many consumers with smaller follower numbers, we had a social reach of over 22 million.

Due to the nature of the content we also had a retweet/repost rate of over 70%, which included the social influencers.

This was an awareness/brand campaign that did not have sales as a metric. Due to the very nature of targeting happy posts, there was nothing but a positive brand association with Coca-Cola.

Data gathering & Target audience

We started by finding the obvious go-to hashtags (#happy #blessed #lovelife etc). Using these, we then got a broader view of the topics that made people happy ("Spending time with my family #happy" or "Look how cute this dog is #happy").

We then mined these topics for a deeper understanding as to which aspects of these topics made people happy, and whether they were, in general, associated with happiness more often. By deep-diving into these datasets, we created a list of hashtags that when we searched them, we would find mostly positive and happy posts.

The only limitation to our targeting was that the consumers were South African.

Relevance to platform & Approach

Social media is where people share their personal moments, perfect for our strategy of spreading happiness. This approach also allowed us to get consumers associating moments of happiness with the Coke brand

Situation

November 2015 marked the centenary of Coca-Cola's iconic contoured bottle. For a hundred years the glass bottle has been bringing happiness to people's lives, which is brought to life by the brand's old tagline - Open Happiness.

Brief

Ideate a campaign that used the contour bottle to bring happiness to people's lives.

Objectives

The campaign must be genuine, meaningful and nuture a strong association between the consumer and moments of happiness. The Coke bottle, of course, had to be at the centre of the campaign.