Social Media 68 | SunMatrix Ramble

Xbox Lips: Jukebox Turns Photos into Videos

AKQA has taken Xbox Lips digital with the “Lips Jukebox” on Facebook, which enables users to transform their photos into music videos, in a bid to promote the new game “Lips Number One Hits”.

The application is hosted at the Xbox website, and uses a combination of facial recognition technology and Facebook Connect functionality to enable people to choose a song and the photos they want to adapt from their profile before adding singing “Lips” to the faces and then creating the animated, personalized music video.

For social experience design, the winning pattern is simple: let people reuse what they already have, then return a share-ready artifact that feels personal without requiring effort.

Why this idea lands

This is a clean example of “personalisation as entertainment”, meaning it turns something people already have, their photos, into something people want to show, a personalised music video.

Extractable takeaway: If the input is already in the user’s profile and the output looks like finished entertainment, participation becomes a default choice rather than a deliberate one.

The real question is whether your experience returns something people are proud to share, not whether the underlying tech is impressive.

Low friction input. Your Facebook photos are already there.
High novelty output. Seeing faces “sing” creates instant curiosity and share value.
Product-fit promotion. A singing video experience naturally aligns with a music game.

Facial recognition as a feature, not a headline

The facial recognition is not presented as “tech for tech’s sake”. It is simply the enabling layer that makes the result feel surprisingly accurate and personal. Because the facial recognition runs behind the scenes, the experience feels effortless and personal, which makes people more likely to finish the flow and share the output.

This is the right way to use facial recognition in marketing: as invisible plumbing that serves the payoff.

In consumer product launches that rely on social sharing, remixing existing profile media into a finished asset is often the fastest path to reach without asking for extra effort.

What to take from this if you build social experiences

Turn existing assets into new value. Users are more likely to participate when they can reuse what they already have.
Make the output share-ready. The “end product” should be something people naturally want to post.
Keep creation steps short. Selection, preview, publish. The loop should feel quick.
Align the experience with the product promise. A music game promoted through a music-video maker feels coherent.

A few fast answers before you act

What is the Xbox Lips Jukebox?

It is a Facebook-connected experience that lets users transform their photos into animated, personalised music videos to promote “Lips Number One Hits”.

What technologies does it use?

It combines facial recognition with Facebook Connect so users can select songs and photos, then apply singing “Lips” to faces and generate a video.

Where is the application hosted?

It is hosted on the Xbox website.

Why does this work as game marketing?

It creates a playful, shareable output that matches the core theme of the game. Music and performance.

What is the transferable lesson?

When you can turn user content into entertainment with minimal effort, you can earn both engagement time and social sharing without heavy persuasion.

Coca-Cola: Expedition 206 Social Media Tour

In a first-of-its-kind undertaking, Coca-Cola is using a social media driven travel campaign to tap regular people as “Happiness Ambassadors”. The idea is to have them travel through 2010 and document the entire quest via blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos, TwitPics (quick photo updates), and other social media updates.

Currently there is a contest in progress to shortlist the brand ambassadors. Their mission is to find happiness in the 206 different countries that sell Coca-Cola products around the world.

The winning three-person team will begin their journey on January 1, 2010 and attempt to travel more than 150,000 miles in 365 days, visiting each of the 206 countries where Coca-Cola is sold. Their duty is to engage with local denizens and uncover what makes them happy. After that, they are to share their experiences online and complete tasks in each country as determined by online voters.

How the campaign is built

The mechanism is a clean loop: run an online selection process, send a small team into the world, and let the content trail become the campaign. The “media plan” is the itinerary. The “creative unit” is whatever the ambassadors publish that day. Because the itinerary forces daily encounters and updates, the campaign keeps generating fresh moments without needing a new ad concept each week.

In global FMCG marketing, social content performs best when it is tethered to a real-world mission that naturally generates stories.

The real question is how you design a mission that keeps producing episodes, while giving the audience lightweight control over what happens next.

Why it lands

This structure works because it turns a travel log into an episodic program, and the audience input keeps the next update relevant.

Extractable takeaway. Social media campaigns stay watchable when you design an ongoing mission with built-in episodes, then let audiences influence the next episode through lightweight participation like voting and challenges.

It turns reach into participation. People are not only consuming updates. They are voting, shaping tasks, and effectively co-authoring the journey.
It scales across formats without forcing a single channel. Blog for depth, tweets for pulse, video for emotion, and photos for proof. Each piece can travel on its own while still pointing back to the expedition.
It makes “happiness” concrete. Instead of treating happiness as an abstract brand word, it is framed as something you can go find, ask about, and document country by country.

Borrowable moves

Make the content agenda unavoidable. If the team must travel and meet people anyway, the story supply is baked in.
Use audience input as fuel, not a gimmick. Let voting shape tasks that create better moments, not just vanity engagement.
Define the “job” clearly. A simple role title like “Happiness Ambassador” makes the concept easy to repeat and easy to explain.

A few fast answers before you act

What is Expedition 206?

A Coca-Cola project that selects a small team to travel during 2010, visiting markets where Coca-Cola is sold and documenting what people say makes them happy.

Why “206”?

It refers to the number of countries and territories the campaign aims to cover, aligned to Coca-Cola’s global footprint.

What role does social media play here?

It is both the documentation layer and the distribution layer. The journey produces content. The content keeps the campaign alive between milestones.

Why add voter-determined tasks?

It converts passive following into participation and gives the audience a reason to return, because they can influence what happens next.

What makes this different from sending influencers on a trip?

The structure is more like a year-long episodic program with a mission and audience input, rather than a short sponsored travel series.

Coke Zero: Find Your Online Lookalike

A social experiment built on the “evil twin” feeling

If you have ever reckoned you have an evil twin somewhere else in the world, or that you were separated at birth but no one has got round to telling you, Coke Zero’s “worldwide social networking experiment” plays directly into that curiosity.

Coke Zero created a Facebook app called the “Facial Profiler” with one clear aim: find your online lookalike.

The mechanic is simple and self-explanatory. You upload a photo to the database. Coke analyses the facial characteristics and attempts to find the nearest match from other uploaded images.

In global FMCG marketing, lightweight social utilities can turn personal identity-curiosity into mass participation with minimal friction.

Why it spreads without feeling like an ad

This works because the “reward” is social, not transactional. People want to see the result, they want to show friends, and they want friends to try it back, which increases the pool of uploaded images and improves the matching for everyone.

Extractable takeaway: If the output stays debatable instead of perfectly final, people replay, compare, and recruit others, which keeps the loop moving without needing incentives.

Where the brand message sits in the experience

The campaign does not argue product attributes head-on. Instead, it borrows the logic of the product proposition and turns it into a human metaphor: “close enough” can still be compelling.

The real question is whether your experience makes the proposition felt through participation, not explained through claims.

When the promise is hard to prove in the moment, translating it into an experience like this is a smarter route than piling on more copy.

The idea behind the campaign is: ‘If Coke Zero has the taste of Coke…is it possible that someone out there has your face?’.

Steal this loop for your next participation mechanic

A participation mechanic is the simple action-and-reward loop that gets people to join, share, and bring in others.

Start with a universal itch. Identity, comparison, and “who do I look like” is instantly legible in any market.
Make the first step frictionless. One upload, one result, immediate payoff.
Let the community improve the product. Every participant makes the experience better for the next one.
Encode the proposition in the mechanic. The “same taste” claim becomes a story people can experience, not just hear.

A few fast answers before you act

What is Coke Zero’s Facial Profiler?

It is a Facebook application that invites people to upload a photo and then returns the closest lookalike match from other uploaded images in the database.

How does the campaign mechanic work?

Participation creates the asset. Users contribute photos, the system compares facial characteristics, and the database grows with every upload, which increases the chance of finding a “near match”.

Why does this kind of idea get shared?

Because the output is personal and social. The result is fun to show, fun to debate, and it prompts friends to try it too, which naturally amplifies reach.

What is the business intent behind the experience?

To make the Coke Zero proposition memorable by translating “close enough to Coke” into a human analogy, so the brand message is felt through participation rather than explained through claims.

What is the most transferable lesson for digital campaigns?

Build a simple loop where the audience action creates the content, the content creates conversation, and the conversation recruits the next participant.