Send a Tweet to Coke's Digital Billboard, and It'll Tell You Fun Facts About Your Name

via AdWeek

Following up its clever drinkable billboard for Coke Zero, Coca-Cola has launched another eye-catching outdoor idea, this time in Times Square.

The new billboard continues to build off Coke's name-obsessed "Share a Coke" campaign by showing fun facts about the names of people who tweet to the sign.

At the heart of the display is a microsite that Coke and Google created together to pull in facts about the 1,000 names the soda company has printed on its cans and bottles this summer.

For example, people named Ben learn that the name has starred in 1,618 movies since 1986. Also, 2 percent of the world's Katies write stories for a living, according to Google's data. (And one of them works here.)

After a name is typed in, a handful of digital facts about the person's name flow across the screen out of an animated bottle of Coke for a few minutes.

To bring that same experience to its outdoor billboard in Times Square, Coke enlisted Clear Channel Outdoor to build a campaign that is activated through Twitter. Fans who tweet with their name and the hashtag #Cokemyname are populating the billboard in real-time.

Per Clear Channel Outdoor, once someone fires off a tagged tweet, it is displayed on the big screen within two minutes.

Then, a webcam set up across the street automatically snaps a picture of the person's name. Coke's social media team then tweets back the photo to the person within one hour. The idea is that someone doesn't need to be in Times Square to take part in the campaign.

"That potentially then seeds more social sharing amongst your Twitter followers [and] social impressions," said Sean McCaffrey, Clear Channel Outdoor's svp of national client strategy and partnerships. "It's the interesting convergence of the mobile, digital and physical worlds."

The activation has been live for two weeks so far and has served up roughly 200 custom messages per day, with the billboard itself being the only media promoting the campaign.

Last year, the soda giant's campaign included a simpler experiential component, where people could text in their names to light up a board. But with more out-of-home advertising moving towards digital, Clear Channel Outdoor says this year's campaign is different since it stems from an online concept.

"[It's] a really interesting use case for us that we've been trying to show advertisers for the last several years on how to create and use this platform that we're building," McCaffrey said.