Now you too can be the face of Zero Sugar Coca-Cola, with just a little help from AI to add a bottle of coke, or maybe a Coca-Cola shirt and a touch-up. After teasing on Weibo on 18 March, the function is now available to all via Coca-Cola’s WeChat Mini Program from 22 March.
The campaign also invited celebrities like Coca-Cola’s global ambassador actor Yang Yang and singer Lin Mo among others, as well as a crowd of influencers. Online, the beverage brand is continuously posting these AI-generated posters on Weibo. Offline, Coca-Cola brings walls of posters through physical posters, hoardings and screens to Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and Shenzhen, with regular participants placed next to the influencers.
On Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, the topic “Zero Sugar Coke invites you to be an ambassador” (#无糖可口可乐邀你代言) amassed a whopping 130 million views. Of course, it can be attributed to the fans of the celebrities involved. For example, the Weibo post of Yang Yang’s poster garnered over a million reposts and 100,000 likes, while the one about Lian Huaiwei gained over 209,000 reposts and 6,400 likes.
Coca-Cola has been experimenting with AIGC with its Zero Sugar brand, perhaps because of its association with youth and technology. Last October, the brand teamed up with Holiland to make AI-co-created truffle chocolate, as well as a Baidu-powered AI image-processing app. But this time, the focus is shifted to participation and interactivity between the brand and its followers. In a way, the customers are ambassadors of the brand at any time, while spelling it out with an interactive event will not only provide fun but also agency to fans. Each time a participant shares the AI co-created poster of themselves, the brand gains exposure and e-word-of-mouth, making it an innovative and effective use of AI from Coca-Cola.
