Fanta Creates All-Vine Comedy Show to Engage Teens

To support its mantra of “More Fanta, Less Serious,” soft drink brand Fanta is debuting a Vine-based digital campaign in the U.S., “Fanta for the Funny,” which features an original interactive comedy series created by teens.

To create the campaign, which rolled out August 15, Fanta worked closely with a team of influential young Vine comedians, including Alli Cattt, Jason Mendez, and Mighty Duck, to co-create Vine-based comedy shows for teens.

The digital episodes focus on topics that teens care about, like music and sports, and a new episode will go live every Friday for six weeks on CollegeHumor.com. Teens can follow the funny series at @FantaFun and share the videos with the hashtag #FantaForTheFunny. Fanta is also encouraging teens to create their own Vine clips.

The campaign was created in partnership with agency 360i. Based on online listening research, 360i found that teens are interacting with Vines at twice the rate of other audiences in search of humor, entertainment, and creativity. And Starcom MediaVest Group, who handled the media buy, selected CollegeHumor as a partner because of the site’s popularity in the humor space.

“It was a seamless tie-in with Fanta’s ‘Less Serious’ attitude,” says Racquel Mason, assistant vice president of Fanta and Flavors. “We saw that teens were already creating humorous content on their own Vine pages, and this partnership gave us the opportunity give them the stage to take their comedy to the next level of awareness.”

There are lots of brands embracing Vine today, but while few have made their six-second videos resonate with consumers, Fanta seems to have cracked the code by targeting teens and focusing on humor.

“The Fanta Vine production is different than any other campaign I have heard about on Vine,” says Meagan Cignoli, director of short branded videos and founder of New York-based video production agency Visual Country. “For starters, [they’re] sponsoring comedy to later be hosted on another site but not specifically using the product in the content. That’s the kind of campaign we love, because it gives Fanta a cool factor without being overly branded.”

An experienced Vine creator who has worked with BBDO to produce the viral Lowe’s “Fix in Six” Vine campaign, Cignoli suggests that brands should focus on telling stories that fit with the brand, rather than a hard sell.

“In Fanta’s case, they are also working with artists who are rarely tapped for these sort of things, so it’s nice to see these talented comedians getting to create something so open,” she adds.

With the support of the young Vine influencers, Fanta tells ClickZ that in its first three days the “Fanta for the Fun” promotional Vine has generated more than 385,000 loops and 1,400 likes, which is 24 times the engagement of any other Fanta branded Vine videos.

In addition, the campaign has generated more than 3 million impressions on Twitter so far.

“It’s all about bringing the Fanta experience to the channels where [teens] already play and allowing them to create, connect, communicate, and share their way,” Fanta’s Mason notes.