Coca-Cola has long had a similar brief for its marketing agenda. Across all of its markets, it aims to successfully engage and connect with consumers through a wide range of communication tools and media.  Increasingly however, that has included the digital space as a special point of focus and the team for greater China has invested a high amount of energy and resources in this area in particular.

Its Coca-Cola 2011 Summer "Chok" campaign has been a testament to this focus, and a deserved winner of three Digital Media awards in the Integrated, Media Innovation, and Apps categories. Acknowledging that its target youth demographic was now paying less attention to TV, in favour of more social and interactive media, Coca-Cola China needed to evolve the connection between its brand and its consumers. The Summer “Chok” campaign aimed to break free from traditional one-way TV advertising, and create a unique platform that teens could interact and play with.

But it still kept elements of traditional Coca-Cola marketing success stories. The “Under-the-Crown” prize promotions have been reinvented for the digital age. Instead of looking under the caps of their drinks, consumers captured and revealed their “under-the-crown” prize directly from their TV screens, via their mobile phones.

In the innovative app, which was available for free download free to iPhones and Android smartphones, users could capture virtual Coca-Cola crowns from their own TVs.  Crowns were captured by using a swinging action on the smartphone (Hong Kongers have a unique name for this action: it is to “chok”). The collected virtual crowns could be used to enter an instant lucky draw, with prizes such as a car, credit card spending, travel coupons, movie tickets, as well as a range of digital consumer goods such as mobile games and wallpapers.

The app was used in conjunction with the Coca-Cola summer TV commercial (which hosted the virtual crowns), creating a unique interactive opportunity. The campaign ran on prime time television programming, and was supported by both traditional and online elements.

Just 15 hours after the campaign launch, the Coca Cola "Chok" app had become the number 1 free app at the Apple store. It would stay in that position for a full week after that, and by the third week, more than 300,000 unique downloads had been recorded.

The interactive television commercial was played over five million times during the summer, with online social discussion of the campaign and the brand increased by 218 per cent.

These sorts of results show how quickly and powerfully a brand can connect with what is normally a very difficult-to-engage-with demographic through digital and interactive innovation. Coca-Cola China has shown that it can take traditional ideas, adapt them to the new media space, and use that as a hub for supporting media activities.  It has shown a clear understanding of how best to integrate both traditional and digital elements in a single, cohesive campaign that engages consumers.