Moin: The work behind this started more than 15 months back.
The work started with fall football, and we continued to take the idea of March Madness. One of the things we realized is that we sometimes endanger our work by logo pasting: There’s an event, we are a partner of it and we are bringing this event to you. That doesn’t have a lot of relevance for an average person.
For about four months, we kept obsessing about this: We understand sports and we understand our brand, but what is the nexus where the two meet? Passionate fans have one thing in common: They sing, dance, cheer and enjoy themselves, and when they do that, they get thirsty. When they get thirsty, hopefully, they’re going to have a Coca-Cola.
The discussion I had with my team was that it has to be something where you cannot put a car, you cannot put a candy, you cannot put a phone: It has to be, first, a beverage and, then, with the values we execute, has to be just Coca-Cola. We found that space, which is “Fan Work is Thirsty Work.”
So what made you opt to illustrate the fan experience this way?
Understanding the culture of basketball, we found this magical space of spells.
We asked, “How do we bring that to life?” That captures the essence of fan passion. Every spell is physical. It makes us thirsty, and that’s where Coca-Cola comes in. Then, you have the craft behind getting the music and the moments right. Our machinery obsesses about the execution of every single element. Where does the content show up? Why? What is that moment?
This time, I’m particularly happy because as we got deeper into culture, we saw that the ultimate experience that we can bring when it comes to content is to show Sunday night, who’s going to win the Final Four and put the team up. So far, we don’t have that capability. But once it narrowed, we worked on the elements of logistics. How can we shoot the right stuff, make it available and edit it? It cannot look like a sloppy job just because we’re showing the Final Four teams in it. Thankfully, we were able to get that done for the first time in almost real time so that our message was going out at the same time those teams were playing.