All eyes are on the Happiness Machine

posted by: tara

Inside look: Coke’s ‘Happiness Machine’ garners 1.5M views

How do you communicate happiness? And how do you communicate it so well that millions of people embrace the concept? Coca-Cola has grappled with this challenge since launching its “Open Happiness” advertising and marketing initiative in early 2009. A viral video featuring a “Happiness Machine”—a vending machine that doles out everything from Cokes to pizzas—appears to have met this challenge, garnering more than 1.5 million views since it was posted on YouTube in mid-January.

How did they do it?

1. Brainstorming sessions. “We did have some tactical goals,” which helped frame the creative process, McClay explains. “We wanted a concept that was scalable and repeatable” —that is, if the idea worked, it could be retooled and used again. “You want to come up with something that would be adaptable by different regions. We also wanted something that people could participate in, and we wanted people to see this participation.

2. Figure out where to put the happiness-sharing machine. “We talked about using a beach, but it didn’t seem feasible,” McClay says. The team didn’t want to engage random passers-by, since they might not be inclined to share the freebies and enjoy the experience, plus it would be hard to shoot unobtrusively in an outdoor locale. A college community room seemed to offer the best combination of young people who would engage with each other, plus an indoor spot was more controllable.

3. Now came the tough part: making the video happen. To create a reality video that you hope will go viral, you can’t just point the camera and hope for good luck, McClay says: “We had a plan for what we would deliver out of the machine, and where the crews and the cameras would be."

Even though the video was unscripted, the team still had a plan for moving the action along, explains McClay. “It was a little like party planning,” he recalls. “When you’re engaging people, the action has to escalate.” In other words, once the creative team could see that the students were getting a kick out of the freebies, they needed to build on the buzz with even better giveaways to keep the interest level high.

Artcile Source: Christine Kent