Banter Better With Coca-Cola

Category: Channel | Use of Insights & Strategy Award Level: SILVER Brand: Coca Cola | Entrant Company: Isobar Nigeria, Lagos, Nigeria...

Category: Channel | Use of Insights & Strategy Award Level: SILVER Brand: Coca Cola | Entrant Company: Isobar Nigeria, Lagos, Nigeria Background
When brands sponsor sporting events, often times their efforts brings more benefit for the league than it does for them.
This is why fans are often indifferent to brands' adverts in the space.
And so with Coca-Cola's sponsorship of the Premier League in Nigeria, there were two new challenges:

- How could the brand activate its package in a way that transformed it from being just another sponsor to being a brand that stood for and with those who make the game special... the fans
- And more importantly for a sport affiliated with beer, how could we turn EPL viewing occasions into Coca-Cola consumption moments?
Creative Idea
The creative idea "Banter Better" was borne out of the truth that Premier League fans in Nigeria live and breathe all things that concerns their favourite clubs.
This is because the rewards and consequences of being a fan, don’t start and stop when the games do.
These continue to live in the daily interactions and engagements they have with other fans.
As much as they are not able to effect the outcome on the pitch, they can play their part by representing their club with pride in moments of victory, and casting off their failures in moments of defeat.
They do all of this through one universal verbal language… through banter.
As such, even the campaign's visual identity system was built on using visual cues to map the player's sharp interactions on the pitch and bring it to life such that it mirrors the back and forth banter that happens between the fans off the pitch.
Strategy
The campaign strategy was designed to fit seamlessly with a teenage fans' 360 experience of the English Premier League, while delighting older fans as well.
These fans enjoy second screening the game, so the campaign's connection strategy leveraged strongly on the use of digital, adopting a mobile first approach to truly connect with the fans.

However placement without content is pointless, so to celebrate the essence of banter, the campaign needed to be loud and unmissable while maintaining Coca-Cola's identity as a uniting brand. As such OOH platforms were used to invite people to banter better with the use of interactive billboards that allowed rival fans to banter at and with each other using Coca-Cola's real estate as a platform.

Overall in planning and execution, the approach was to be present during all fan moments when they experience and express their football emotions, empathizing with them and enabling their expressions through BANTER.
Insight
To create a football campaign that was different from others, we executed a week-long hothouse session that began in the homes of fans (core and passive).

By interviewing fans in the spaces where they followed the game passionately, we detailed their EPL rituals and segmented them into three winnable moments: the anticipatory, in-game and reflective moments.
Their sharing behavior online during the game informed our decision to make chat stickers and other native snack-able content.

While through their declaration of Coca-Cola’s intrinsic quality as a beverage that uplifts, we were able to help fans cast off their teams failures by creating custom profile pictures that read “Not available for banter” for use when their teams lost.
And as they prepped for the next game during the week, we targeted sports sites that hosted pre-game squad lists and used them to deliver our message reminding fans to “stock-up” their fridges with a bottle of ice-cold Coca-Cola.

The result? Sales.
Execution
We introduced the campaign by posting creatives that teased the highs and lows of iconic up Premier League clubs to engage their fans. Core fans rushed to the defense of their clubs while tagging opposing fans to join in the banter.
Next, we took to the streets to capture organic fan insight to the question: “what does banter mean to you?”. The result was a serialized vox pop that earned over 1.5 million views.

And as they prepped for the next week’s games, we targeted sports sites that hosted pre-game squad lists and used them to deliver our message reminding fans to “stock-up” their fridges with a bottle of ice-cold Coca-Cola.
As a product, Coca-Cola has a strong intrinsic credibility of providing upliftment and refreshment to millions. And as a brand, it has served as an enabler of social connections. By bringing these two together for this campaign, we were able to invite Nigeria to Banter Better with Coca-Cola.
Results
In less than 3 months, we achieved over 1,063,361 social engagements, over 6,000,00 million video views
and gained 122,000 new followers across all social media platforms.

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15 - 17 May 2025

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