Coca-Cola China Partners With eYeka for Creative Crowdsourcing

Coca-Cola has launched a creative crowdsourcing contest to gain brand and marketing insights for the Chinese market.

The soft drink giant is inviting participants on creative crowdsourcing platform eYeka to create a 30-second video or visual illustration to show why “the taste of Coke is so unique and wonderful.” Six winners will share €30,000 (US$37,100) in prize money.

“We are interested to know what you love about the taste of Coke and we want you to use your imagination and creativity to explain it to us,” says the bilingual Chinese and English video brief. “Let us into your head and mouth and share your personal experience by showing us why the taste of Coke is simply awesome.”

The campaign is as much about obtaining quality China-specific content for Coke’s future marketing and communication strategies as it is about market research into how Chinese consumers associate with the Coca-Cola brand, says Richard Cotton, creative excellence director of Coca-Cola China.

“The core of the brief is to dramatize what Coke tastes like to an audience,” he says. “We have done a lot of research into that, but now we are taking it that next step to the creative community and we hope it will be really uplifting and inspiring for us. I’m expecting some deeper insight into a really interesting brief.”

eYeka is promoting the campaign to its 300,000 creative talents through its global and Chinese databases via its email direct marketing (EDM) system, blogs, and other social media channels including Weibo, WeChat, and an eYeka app in China. A Chinese-speaking community manager is overseeing the greater China channel.

Singapore-based Barbara Guerpillon, eYeka’s global key account director for Coca-Cola, says brands use the crowdsourcing platform as a source of innovative ideas and video content.

“Creativity has no borders and with fun challenges our community enjoys submitting fresh ideas,” she says. “Brands work with eYeka not to receive one idea, but hundreds.”

McCann, Coca-Cola’s agency partner for the campaign, will sort the submissions and work with Coke on ways to use the content for future marketing initiatives, says Cotton.

Coca-Cola joins other multinational brands including Nestle, Unilever, and Intel to crowdsource creative content from eYeka’s database.

Peter Dingle, brand and strategy tablet lead for Intel Asia Pacific and Japan, says Coca-Cola’s decision to use the eYeka platform is a clever one.

“The brand is searching for an insight into the connection between Coca-Cola and real people of China – it’s asking how it can make the brand feel more like China, so it can continue to grow by being loved,” he says.

“The campaign will be successful if it successfully spurs a connection between the product and emotion, and if it becomes a brand that more consumers in China can relate to, natively.”

Submissions for the Coca-Cola China Print contest close on January 11, 2015, and the Coca-Cola China Video contest on January 18.