Tag: Coca Cola Campaigns

Coca-Cola: Wallet of Happiness Honesty Test

An honesty test on a crowded Lima street

As part of an experiment in a very crowded Lima district in Peru, Coca-Cola with their agency McCann Erickson deliberately left a wallet containing $100 on the street. With it they tested people’s honesty.

A $100 question, asked in public

The brilliance is how quickly the situation reads. Find the wallet. Notice the money. Decide what kind of person you want to be, with nobody asking you anything.

In social experiment storytelling, a simple moral trigger creates instant comprehension and invites viewers to project themselves into the decision.

Why you keep watching

You are not just judging strangers. You are quietly measuring yourself against what you hope you would do. That internal comparison is the engine of the film.

What the experiment is trying to reveal

People’s honesty, observed in a real public setting through a simple, high-stakes trigger.

What to borrow

  • Choose a mechanic that is universal and legible without narration.
  • Keep production minimal so human reaction stays central.
  • Let the audience do the interpreting. A good social test creates its own debate.

A few fast answers before you act

What did Coca-Cola do in Lima?

They left a wallet containing $100 on the street in a crowded district to test people’s honesty.

Where did this take place?

In a crowded district of Lima, Peru.

Who created the campaign?

The post credits Coca-Cola and McCann Erickson.

What was the point of the experiment?

To observe how people would react when they found a wallet with money in a real-world public setting.

Coca Cola Friendship Machine

You walk up to a Coke machine that is about 12 feet tall. You cannot reach it alone. You ask a buddy for a boost. When you finally press the button, the machine rewards the teamwork by dispensing two Cokes instead of one.

What Coca-Cola is doing with the “Friendship Machine”

The game of vending machine one-upsmanship between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo continues with Coke’s “Friendship Machine”. To celebrate International Friendship Day, Coca-Cola in Argentina plants machines that appear to be about 12 feet tall and require that you ask a buddy for a boost to use it. As a reward, the Coke machine dispenses two Cokes instead of one.

The idea builds on Coke’s “Happiness Machine” viral video, where a machine keeps surprising students with free extras like soda and pizza. Coke also updates that generosity pattern with a “Happiness Truck” video, where a truck gives out Cokes alongside summer gear like surfboards, beach toys, and sunglasses.

PepsiCo responds with its own “Social Vending Machine” that lets you gift free Pepsi’s to friends and strangers via a text message.

A few fast answers before you act

What is the Coca-Cola Friendship Machine?

It is a Coke machine designed to be too tall to use alone, so you need a friend’s help. When you do it together, it dispenses two Cokes as the reward.

Why make the machine intentionally difficult to use?

Because the friction creates the point. It forces a social interaction first, then makes the reward feel earned and shared, not just handed out.

How do the Happiness Machine and Happiness Truck relate?

They establish the “unexpected generosity” pattern. The Friendship Machine applies the same idea, but makes cooperation the trigger instead of surprise alone.

Coca-Cola: Santa’s Forgotten Letters

When childhood letters get answered years later

The city of Santa Claus is situated in the state of Indiana, USA. The museum in the city brings together different objects related to Santa Claus and has long received letters from people around the world, described as doing so for more than 70 years.

Coca-Cola with its ad agency Ogilvy Brazil selected 75 forgotten letters and set out on an impossible task to find the writers and give them exactly what they asked for. The result was a touching movie that reinforces the magic of Christmas.

The impossible brief behind the film

The mechanism is straightforward and brutal in effort. Find a place where old letters to Santa were kept. Read through decades of messages that never got a reply. Select a small set of letters. Then track down the original writers and recreate the exact gifts they once requested.

“Forgotten letters” here means letters that were written to Santa as children, then stored and left unanswered for years.

In global FMCG holiday marketing, the fastest route to belief is to make generosity observable in the real world, not just promised in a tagline.

Santa’s Forgotten Letters is a Coca-Cola Christmas campaign by Ogilvy Brazil that turns archival letters into real deliveries, using the act of fulfillment as the proof of the story.

Why it lands: belief becomes physical

This works because it reverses the usual Christmas-ad formula. Instead of asking the audience to feel something while watching a film, it shows a real-world action first. The emotion is earned by the logistics.

The letters also do the writing for the brand. Each request is specific, personal, and time-stamped by childhood. That specificity makes the surprise feel less like marketing and more like closure.

The business intent hiding inside the sentiment

Coca-Cola is reinforcing a familiar role in the season. It wants to be the brand that protects the “magic” adults quietly miss, and it does that by staging a story people retell without needing to mention product features.

This is brand meaning built through a single, high-signal act that generates a long tail of earned conversation.

What to steal if you want emotion without manipulation

  • Start with an artifact, not an insight. Real letters, real handwriting, real specificity.
  • Make the work visible. Show the searching, the tracking, the making, the delivery.
  • Let the recipients carry the truth. The reactions are the credibility layer.
  • Limit the scope to protect authenticity. A small number of deliveries can feel more believable than a mass stunt.

A few fast answers before you act

What is Coca-Cola’s Santa’s Forgotten Letters campaign?

It is a Christmas film built around a real-world stunt: Coca-Cola and Ogilvy Brazil selected 75 old letters to Santa from Santa Claus, Indiana, tracked down the writers, and delivered the gifts they once asked for.

Why does the “old letters” device work so well?

Because it provides built-in authenticity and specificity. A handwritten childhood request feels personal and irrefutable, which makes the fulfillment feel earned rather than manufactured.

What should brands learn from the execution?

If you want belief, make the action do the persuading. Put the effort on-screen, keep the promise simple, and let real reactions confirm the story.