Coca-Cola Company brand Fanta used creator-generated content for its campaign to authentically connect with gen Z audiences in Vietnam.
Fanta has a distinctive brand platform: "playful at heart." Fanta fuels "colorful" people so they can spread playfulness in the world and fight back against the gray, or the unnecessary seriousness in life.
Fanta has experienced positive double-digit business growth compared to previous years. However, compared to its main competitor, the brand was still behind on volume growth and value shares, prompting its goal of recruiting more consumers and building brand affinity.
Fanta continues to create connections with people who are fun and playful in nature. While recent campaigns were successful, it was time for the brand to level up. The objective was to make Fanta a people's brand and put the power in people's hands to drive a distinctive brand identity. In the process, Fanta, with agency partner EssenceMediacom Vietnam, sought to create a strong community of like-minded people to endorse the brand.
The target audience was gen Z and millennials aged 15 to 39, who make up 65 percent of Fanta consumers and 77 percent of carbonated soft drink category buyers. However, Fanta acknowledged that anyone could be "colorful." With that fact in mind, Fanta aimed to reach individuals who had the attitude of being playful-hearted, no matter the age. Fanta was after a psychographic target beyond demographics.
Fanta undertook to ignite a viral wave of playful creation and help the brand trend on social media through its back-to-back seasons of "Fanta-stic" ads, which allowed anyone to make a Fanta ad and allowed the creator generation, gen Z, to design a Fanta can.
Fanta let gen Z creators be instigators. While the campaign kicked off with Fanta's top two playful creators, Chris Phan and Hau Hoang, the gen Z TikTok creators' partnership ignited a trend and started recruiting playful-at-heart people of all ages to the "Fantaverse." As more creators joined in, the brand was able to capitalize on a variety of user-made ads, which were further promoted through OOH media, allowing the creators to get fame and recognition.
The campaign was rolled out in two back-to-back seasons.
Season 1
Fanta kicked off the campaign with a video that featured the brand's ambassadors, Chris Phan and Hau Hoang, gen Z icons, to set the trend.
The brand then worked closely with TikTok to identify the most creative creators and let them re-create their favorite soft drink in their own way. The creator ads that were posted on TikTok included Fanta underwater, Fanta in outer space, Fanta in the Mona Lisa, etc. The campaign went beyond gen Z when even playful elders joined the fun on TikTok.
Season 2
Taking the co-creation a step further, Fanta launched the next step of the campaign, in which creators could unleash their creativity by designing their own Fanta flavors and packaging. This "blank canvas" approach encouraged them to explore unconventional flavor combinations and packaging designs, celebrating their individuality and unique flavor stories.
The amplification was equally creative and playful, with mainstream takeovers on billboards and social media. Recognizing that playfulness should be celebrated and shared to everyone, all user-generated content was showcased on social media and billboards across Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, transforming the cityscape into a public watch party of the user-generated ads.
The entirely digital-focused campaign, developed with the creators at the center and TikTok as the key platform, promoted strong affinity among playful-hearted people.
TikTok was the correct platform to use, as it is the creative canvas of gen Z — where a trend can be created and go viral, which is effective for a brand like Fanta. The brand's hypothesis was based on previous results that showed creator-led content drives higher view-through-rates and affinity scores on TikTok compared to the use of only brand-owned assets.
Overall, the campaign execution resulted in audience participation, engagement, and exposure. Fanta achieved virality on social media, thanks to the campaign's authentic, playful content. Additionally, campaign:
The campaign also helped Fanta surpass its key competitor in top-of-mind awareness for the first time, while affinity and consideration continued to grow.
