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Coca-Cola Zero Kaizen 2.0 – New look, New taste

Client

The Coca-Cola Company. The campaign ran in Greece in partnership with Mindshare.

“Exit Bee is a valuable partner that provides always great and innovative solutions that lift off the performance of our campaign’s targets. This is what happened with our launch of the new Coke Zero campaign which outperformed the initially estimated KPIs and ended up being a success story.”

Maria Fitta,
Media Operations Senior Manager Greece, Cyprus, Malta
The Coca-Cola Company

Challenge

The Coca-Cola Company announced the launch of a new formula and new design for Coca-Cola Zero and promised that “it will be rolling out an even more delicious and refreshing recipe and bold new packaging to deliver an even more iconic Coke taste.”

In Greece, the launch was scheduled in May and based on the initial brief, the primary communication goal was to raise awareness on the new taste and further build on key drinking occasions.

The campaign targeted the broad audience ad 18-44 with main creative asset a short intrinsic video inviting everyone to try the new Coca-Cola Zero now.

Solution

Creative

We used our eye-catching platform creative and the ad looked like this:

Coca-Cola Zero - Exit Bee Video Ad

Obviously, the ad was served when Exit Bee’s behavioural tracking recognized that users were no longer engaged with the website and were ready to exit. Those “in-between” moments are when users are most receptive and more likely to engage with something they haven’t planned for.

Performance

User receptiveness was proven by the campaign’s performance, with the highlight being the over 6% who decided to also click the call-to-action button. This is well above average compared to Exit Bee’s industry benchmark at 4.69% CTR and around 30 times higher than the display banner average CTR.

The ad was served across the entire country, as seen below:

Coca Cola Zero - Campaign Geo Targeting

But we didn’t stop there…

After the awareness video campaign ended, we used Exit Bee’s advanced contextual targeting to serve different creatives based on the content the users were consuming. Our goal was to drive consideration and trial by linking the new product to its key drinking moments.

There were three pillars: entertainment (binge watching), meals & breaks and gaming and three creatives to target these audiences.

In this case we used Exit Bee’s boxed formats and the ads looked like this:

Entertainment targeting

Coca Cola Zero - Exit Bee Campaign - Entertainment Targeting

Meals & Breaks targeting

Coca-Cola Zero - Meals & Breaks Targeting

Gaming targeting

Coca-Cola Zero - Gaming Targeting

Targeting

Two targeting methodologies

Our first targeting approach was to reach the users that had previously seen the awareness video ad and more specifically the ones that either clicked or had a higher than average dwell time on that ad. The goal was to reinforce the message.

The second approach was to contextually target the right users irrespective of the awareness campaign. Were you reading about the best new shows on Netflix? As soon as you were done, you’d see “The best Coca-Cola for binge watching”. Browsing gaming content? “The best Coca-Cola for epic gaming”.

Results

The performance was more or less the same across all three of those audiences, with gaming having a slightly higher CTR when re-targeting the users that saw and/or engaged with the awareness ad and entertainment had a slightly higher CTR when we targeted users contextually.

The contextual targeting overall achieved a 17% higher CTR.

Closing thoughts

Last impressions are memorable. Targeting users at the end of a visit (instead of trying to interrupt them like a banner would do), means that we can get their attention, but also have a higher chance of achieving top of mind awareness.

The use of a premium, tailored format for the video awareness campaign combined with the targeting methodology of the campaign that followed, gave Coca-Cola the opportunity to reach the right audience in an engaging way.

The campaign results exceeded expectations and outperformed all other display ad channels.