Coke invents bottle label that doubles as festival wristband

© McCann

Coca-Cola has developed a bottle label for its drinks in Romania that can double as a festival wristband, with summer quickly approaching in Europe.

The tearable wristbands can be found at the bottom of Coca-Cola’s regular labels and come in eight separate designs, all featuring quirky iconography that will appeal largely to festival-going Romanian teens. They include musical instruments and cassette tapes, emojis and cartoon characters.

As well as being intended as a collectible, the wristbands also offer consumers the chance to win access to one of the country’s biggest music festivals.

They can find out if they’re a winner by removing the wristband from promotional packs of Coca-Cola and scanning the barcode using a specially designed smartphone app. Winning wristbands will then count as admission to major music events including Untold – an electronic music festival held in Cluj-Napoca, in northern Romania, this August.

Coca-Cola said the activation was inspired by research that showed a greater proportion of Romanian teenagers were attending music festivals in the summer than drinking Coca-Cola on a regular basis. The fun and novel competition was about ‘reconnecting with them on their ground’, it said.

One million bottles were distributed nationwide as part of the project, which was organised by advertising agency McCann.

McCann said that the campaign reached more than 117,000 unique users in the first month alone, outperforming any of Coca-Cola’s previous promotions in Romania by a staggering 27%. The soft drinks giant predicted that it reached 75% of teenagers in the country, which has a population of around 19.8 million.

Sales of Coca-Cola products were up 11%, and the specially designed scan app reached the top spot in both the App Store and Google Play.