Coca-Cola was one of the brands behind The Ad Council’s Love Has No Labels campaign launched by R/GA New York in February this year.
The campaign video ran on Upworthy’s Facebook page from 12 February to 3 March and achieved more than 40 million views and one million shares. It was uploaded to YouTube on 3 March and has achieved 52,880,017 views since.
Now Coca-Cola Middle East has picked up the theme for Ramadam, and continues Coke’s campaign to encourage people not to judge each other, with a label-less Coca-Cola can and a video experiment.
The two campaign elements by Memac Ogilvy Dubai and FP7/DXB (McCann Worldwide) Dubai are interwoven. In one part – the web film – a group of strangers is invited to bond with each other over dinner – in the dark.
The other part is a run of new Coke cans. With no labels. These have retained the white Coke ribbon and red Coke background but the Coca-Cola label (logo) has been removed entirely from the front of the can, and all of the information on the back of the can has been replaced with a simple message, “Labels are meant for cans, not people”. The company was able to get around removing any nutrition and ingredient labelling rules by distributing the label-less cans only at events.
The web film, shot with infrared cameras, shows people in the dark discussing their lives, hobbies and interests. Only when the lights go up do they they realise who they’re been chatting to and whatever ideas they'd formed about their chat-mates bang up against reality. The group includes a heavy metal musician, a keen home cook, a student of Emirati Heritage and the Arabic language, and personal branding specialist Loy Machedo.
The point of the video is introduced here. The group is invited to reach under the table to pull out a box of limited edition label-free Coke cans:
FP7/DXB, part of McCann Worldgroup, designed the cans, which will be used to spread the campaign message further afield than the 2.30 minute video can.
Coca-Cola’s aim is to encourage “the world to take an extra second and get to know people”. In its press release Coca-Cola stated:
"In the Middle East, a region with over 200 nationalities and a larger number of labels dividing people, these Coca-Cola cans send a powerful and timeless message that a world without labels is a world without differences. And that we are all basically just the same – human."
