Coca-Cola encourages Londoners to litter less with 'Talking Rubbish' social experiment
From discarded coffee cups to the sticky wraps of chewing gum that temporarily glue our shoes to the pavement, litter is something most of us experience on a daily basis. Recognising that soft drinks packaging is too often part of Britain's rubbish problem, Coca-Cola has now kickstarted an attention-grabbing campaign in a bid to tackle the issue and encourage people to recycle more.
Coca-Cola encourages Londoners to litter less with 'Talking Rubbish' social experiment
Harnessing the momentum of The Drum's Do It Day event yesterday, the drinks giant launched an initiative dubbed 'Talking Rubbish' via an interactive stunt on London's Southbank. The activation gave a taste of what will become a wider campaign for the brand in 2017, and quite literally gave litter a voice of its own.
Creatives from OgilvyOne, Rapp, Hubbub, STVCreative and more devised the campaign, which centered around two litter 'characters' – a coffee cup and a soft drinks can which were placed on footpaths near bins in the capital. The discarded products had speakers inside them which were mic'd up to actors nearby so that passersby thought the litter was talking to them.
To avoid finger-wagging and keep the tone light Coca-Cola gave each item of junk its own personality. So, Claudia the can took on the voice of a "posh, flirty female" who was used to getting her own way, while Charlie the cheeky coffee cup was characterised as a "a hyperactive, feisty and slightly insecure male." The ultimate mission of the litter characters was to get people to pick them up and put them in the bin and to call them out for walking by. The actors voicing the items of litter also used improvisation to engage pedestrians further by commenting on specific things to showcase the real-time element of the stunt, such as "hey you in the yellow jacket."
On Do It Day, during which brands came together to help solve real-world problems in a 24-hour timeframe, Coca-Cola created a short, humourous teaser video to showcase the public's reaction to the stunt.
Coca-Cola's senior manager for corporate responsibility and sustainability (CRS) in Great Britain, Bev Burnham, said the whole event had been a "really positive experience," adding that the winning creative team from the preceding Plan It Day event "worked really well together and gelled very quckly."
"Having the access to that much marketing and creativity is just fabulous," she added.
The brand hopes to take the concept forward in 2017 and build on the online elements of the push. "The idea is that the outputs from Do It Day are ones we can actually use on social media and digital media in order to launch a campaign that we’re hoping to run next year," Burnham told The Drum.
To see all the other things we achieved at Do It Day, read our round-up here.