Client Story: Coca-Cola

Since Bold Content was established in 2013, we’ve worked with Coca-Cola on hundreds of videos for their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives. This relationship has enabled us to film across the world, documenting everything from water sustainability, recycling projects to minority business schemes. 

Our work together has spanned human interest documentaries, animation and promotional videos. 

 

Human Interest Stories

 

When we were tasked with creating videos about Coca-Cola’s sustainability initiatives, the last thing we wanted to do was create a corporate video full of talking heads and statistics. Instead we focussed on the beneficiaries, which allowed us to tell human-interest stories. 

One of our first stories was about Aparicio, a farmer from Valencia whose crops were suffering from a water shortage. Throughout our story we see his character develop through his actions. He is a man who passionately cares about his crops, even talking to them and apologising for the shortage of water. Once we know about his goals and the barrier to those goals, the audience are engaged in the story and we empathise with him. We then learn about Coca-Cola’s involvement and suddenly perceive the impact that their assistance is having. It’s far more compelling than facts and statistics. 

Another programme that we made human interest stories about aimed to educate young people on the benefits of an active lifestyle. We interviewed many inspiring people across Europe about their relationship with being healthy and how sport has improved their lives. 

One of the documentaries we produced was on Olympic Moves, a sports initiative in the Netherlands supported by Coca-Cola’s Active Healthy Living programme. This documentary interviewed teachers and students about how being active can help children gain confidence and achieve better grades in school. 

One of the key challenges for this project was that in the past Coca-Cola’s standard promotional videos for their CSR initiatives had failed to engage with a young digital audience online.

In response to these challenges we focused on identifying compelling human interest stories which engaged emotionally with the target audience. An example of this is with Aaliyah, a teenager from a disadvantaged background whose self-belief was transformed by her involvement in the new sport of Street Dance.

 

Animation

Our animation work for Coca-Cola has been as varied as the CSR initiatives themselves. 

Coca-Cola asked us to help promote their partnership with ThinkYoung to show their investments in young entrepreneurs in Europe. With this animation we mixed animation and live action to tell the story of Lothar, an entrepreneur school graduate from Belgium. 

We made an animation video for the large screens at Piccadilly Circus to celebrate the partnership between Coca-Cola and the Special Olympics.

To support Coca-Cola’s CSR recycling initiative, we produced this fun narrative animation about a young girl called Abby teaching her father about the importance of recycling. 

 

Docuseries

5by20 was a Coca-Cola initiative to enable the economic empowerment of 5 million women in more than 200 countries by 2020. The programme involved providing improved access to training, finance and networking opportunities to its participants. 

Coca-Cola commissioned us to produce a number of documentaries during the initiative to shed a light on some of the amazing female entrepreneurs who have benefited from the 5by20 scheme and how the impact has positively affected their communities. 

One of the documentaries we made for Coca-Cola interviewed Preeti, a shopkeeper in Northern India. 

Two years after we first met Preeti, we travelled back to Northern India to catch up with her and film a follow up documentary to find out how her life had changed due to the solar cooler that Coca-Cola had provided her with.

We turned the filming and editing around within two weeks, which also included having a colour grade and original music composed and delivered it in time for them to post it on their Facebook page to mark International Women’s Day.

Other 5by20 documentary films can be found here.

 

Mini Documentaries

 

Through Coca-Cola’s partnership with ThinkYoung entrepreneurship schools in Europe and Asia, every year 300 young people from all continents are given the opportunity to learn first hand experience from successful entrepreneurs and develop the skills to set up their own company. 

We were asked to create a mini documentary on Naga, a weightlifting champion who went to the ThinkYoung school before setting up his business, Ergonomic. Naga shared his story with us via voiceover and we worked together to create some compelling scenes to visualise his journey.

 

Explainer Videos

We helped support Coca-Cola’s water sustainability initiatives through producing a variety of videos that promote awareness about important issues. For Las Tablas de Daimiel, we created a video that explains the importance of the wetlands and how we must strive to protect these precious ecosystems. 

 

Social Content 

 

As part of our partnership with Coca-Cola we were one of the first companies to produce brand videos for Instagram. We re-purposed CSR documentary content in vertical and square aspect ratios, creating multiple social cut-downs from a series of 30 documentary videos that we had filmed. This resulted in hundreds of social assets which needed to be catalogued and stored in a video library, which we purpose built for them from the ground up. 

 

Distribution 

One of the things we’re most interested in is how to get our content directly to audiences. So rather than just creating one main film, we often create different edits for multiple purposes. 

For example, we create one central piece of content designed to have a broad appeal. This is the ‘human interest story’.

We also create a ‘project edit’ which is designed for use on corporate websites and at conferences to show the good work that Coca-Cola is doing. This has more of a brand focus than the human interest story so it’s less shareable but still an essential piece of content. 

We then edit together ‘supporting content’ so we can target different online audiences. For example, during our shoot about a Coca-Cola supported water project where we met a farmer called Karmenu, we created snackable pieces of content designed to target different online audiences. We created two light-hearted pieces of content ‘Joe’s Farm Tour’ and ’The Game of Bocci as it’s played on Gozo.  These could be described as tent peg content that leads viewers back to the main tent pole films. 

Metrics
Coca-Cola have a very large social media-monitoring department who assess a huge number of metrics about the relative successes of video campaigns. We were able to understand a lot about our audiences by viewing trends from these listening tools. We iterated variables like the run time of each video, we A-B tested thumbnails, and measured the success of campaigns against different stated metrics. This has been a strategically fascinating exercise and the insights now inform all our client work.