AMC and Coca-Cola have been partners for over 100 years. To keep the popcorn and Coke movie ritual strong, they recently set out to reach a younger audience. Our challenge was to turn an existing teen coupon for a Coca-Cola Freestyle Drink and bag of AMC Perfectly Popcorn into a fully branded program made exclusively for teens, ultimately leading to a lifelong love for both brands.
Key Objectives:
- Drive add-to-wallet conversions of the offer coupon
- Increase teen engagement across key platforms
A series of ethnographies revealed a surprising insight, for teens the theatre isn’t a place to escape. Teens go to the movies to be present and share without hesitation. Sharing happens at every stage of the experience, from planning what snacks to share in the concession line to putting down your phone and sharing emotions on the screen, to dipping into the same popcorn bucket and post-movie hot takes. We set out to use this iconic combo at AMC Theatre to establish the concessions & movie going experience as a ritual worthy of sharing. This inspired our idea to turn the Coke and popcorn deal into a movie snack rally cry, celebrating all the different ways friends can share their favorite flavors, giving them permission to Flavor Make their movie snacks.
Introducing: Flavor Make It. The Flavor Make It program celebrates all the different ways friends can share their flavor with AMC and Coca-Cola. The integrated campaign came to life through:
- Video: “Concession Concerto” is a fun, funky, frenetic celebration of the flavor experience that only the perfect combination of AMC Perfectly PopcornTM and Coca-Cola Freestyle® can unlock. The teen experience is reflected throughout, from the expressive live action and animation to the original track inspired by the TikTok earworms currently dominating teen headphones.
- Flavor Maker Mixes and Snack Hacks: We created 6 custom Coca-Cola Freestyle® flavors, and a dedicated webpage that highlights concessions hacks and prompts sharing.
- Paid Social Media: To generate awareness ahead of theatre visits, we built targeted media buys synced to the box office calendar and film slate most appealing to teens. We met the audience in places we know they spend time searching and communicating - TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram.
- Influencers as Flavor Maker Creators: We leveraged teen influencers to rally their friend groups and Flavor Make It together. We intentionally chose creators in a variety of teen interests, from musicians creating their own version of the movie track featured in the spot, to gamers who wanted to share in another form of entertainment, to teen moviegoers giving their review of the Flavor Make It combo.
- Social Sharing Features: We developed AR filters that encouraged teens to share their flavor and armed them with a list of Giphy stickers based on the custom illustrations.
Challenges: This campaign specifically needed to reach 13-19 year olds, which can be challenging with COPPA compliance that rightly protects teens from hyper-specific targeting. While the first campaign flight more generally targeted teens, we learned from our reporting metrics that parents with teens would be a helpful target. Assets were customized to be relevant for this parent audience, and the addition successfully helped us drive more engagement and add to wallet downloads.
The Flavor Make It campaign successfully broke through, establishing Coke and Popcorn as an AMC Theaters ritual:
- Drove add-to-wallet conversions of the offer coupon:
- 4.1% conversion rate, amounting to 34,933 conversions
- Increased teen engagement across key platforms:
- +142M impressions across social
- +1.2M engagements across social
- Teen influencers had an astounding 8.19% average engagement rate, which is +4% above industry standard TikTok rates and +2% above industry standard Instagram rates.
- 16M uses of Flavor Maker gifs and stickers from the AMC Theatres Giphy page
Video for AMC Flavor Maker
