Coca Cola:::Mismatch Generator Mar 2008 - Jun 2008

BRAND OWNER :The Coca Cola Company
CATEGORY :Drinks (non-alcoholic)
REGION :Germany

In 2008, Coca-Cola was one of the official sponsors of the UEFA football championships (Euro 2008) and wanted to reignite the World Cup spirit that had taken over the country during 2006.

Coke decided to act as a facilitator, uniting people in their love for football and for the national team.

The idea was to get Coke to bring even opponents together.

The key target audience was 18-29 year olds who were used to communicating via social networks. Usually people in communities search for people with similar interests, but Coke wanted to turn this idea on its head so that people could connect with people who are very different.

Coke partnered with social community StudiVZ – 4 times bigger than Facebook. We integrated a Coke EURO platform with a new and unique fan-profile generator called the “Mismatch Generator”.

The users had to answer 9 questions about their lifestyle. These profiles run into a database and weekly every participant got 3 opposite mismatches allocated, for example a meat-lover would be matched with a vegetarian, but they were unified by their love of football. Then each week one pair of mismatches won a fan partner championship ticket.

The Mismatch-Generator was pushed by standard online advertising as well as personal addressing and viral components in the community.

Some 100.000 fans in the target-group were activated by the campaign and over 530.000 different mismatches were created. In the end, the activation program contributed considerably to Coca-Cola becoming the Euro 2008 advertiser with the highest awareness and likeability for its Euro communication.