Epica d'Or 2006(film)

The 2006 film Epica d’Or was won by Wieden+Kennedy, Amsterdam, for the new Coca-Cola commercial "Happiness Factory".

The ‘Happiness Factory’ is the first Coca-Cola Global campaign since 1996. It was launched in June 2006 and used in 199 countries to illustrate the brand’s new pitch, ‘The Coke Side Of Life’.

The 60-second spot starts with a young man throwing a coin into a vending machine. Unbeknown to him, the ordinary coin transports the viewer into a psychedelic fantasyland full of animated characters. The coin plunges down a waterfall, which is the cue for a squadron of helicopter pigs to hoist and empty Coke bottle to a towering filling station. A blue soldier with a gold tooth attaches the cap, and the bottle is kissed farewell by fluffy ‘love puppies’. The process of chilling the bottle involves blasting a snowman with a fan as it passes by. When the bottle arrives at the delivery bay, the characters greet it with a carnival, firing themselves from canons with joy. Then the bottle rolls out into the real world. In the final scene, the young man takes his Coke from the slot. As he leaves, he turns briefly back to look at the machine. Did he hear a faint music? Maybe not – he shrugs and goes on his way.

Katie Bayne, Senior Vice-President for Coca-Cola brands in North America comments:

‘It was important for us to re-establish why you love Coca-Cola. […] We started to focus on the glass bottle and the idea that Coke is about happiness in and around the bottle.’

Hunter Hindman, Wieden+Kennedy Art Director adds:

‘We liked the idea of a coin taking you into a fantasy land full of wondrous characters and spectacular landscapes. The vending machine literally delivers happiness in a bottle’.

W+K worked with New York animation experts Psyop to create the imaginary landscape inside the Coca-Cola vending machine, using cutting edge CGI techniques. The film was directed by Psyop’s Kylie Matulick and Todd Mueller.

"Happiness Factory" secured the majority of the jury votes in final run-off against the Honda Civic "Choir" commercial from Wieden+Kennedy London and Fallon London’s new Sony Bravia film ‘Paint’.

It is the first time a Coca-Cola commercial has won Epica’s top award, but the third time for Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, which won in 1994 with the Nike film ‘The Wall’ and again in 2003 with Nike’s "Musical Chairs" commercial.

 

 

Inside Coke’s New World

A look behind the scenes of the Happiness Factory, by Mark Tungate

When Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam needed a TV spot that would appeal to consumers across the globe, the agency decided to abandon the real world altogether. Instead, it joined forces with a team of animation geniuses to create an alternative universe inside a Coca-Cola vending machine.

"At the time we won the account, Coca-Cola had become like the mountain you live next door to but don’t see any more," says Hunter Hindman, creative director on the project along with Rick Condos. "It was so omnipresent that consumers had begun to stop noticing it. Our mission was to bring it back into the foreground."

One of the agency’s solutions to this problem was to focus on a key attribute of the brand: its unique glass bottle. "Every time we thought about Coca-Cola, we kept coming back to that iconic bottle and the great taste you get when you drink out of it. So that became the symbol of everything we wanted to do. For Happiness Factory, we imagined the journey of the bottle through the vending machine. In real life, of course, the machines are kind of boring – but we pictured a highly intricate process."
Hindman says the idea "hung around for a long time" before Coke and the agency moved forward with it. "Everyone liked the idea but we weren’t really sure how to approach it. Part of the problem was that we didn’t know what the new world we wanted to depict would look like. We only knew that we didn’t want it to be easy, sugar-coated animation. It had to have a slightly darker side, otherwise contemporary consumers just wouldn’t engage with it."

Hindman and Condos remembered Psyop, a New York based computer animation company they had come across in previous jobs at the San Francisco agency Goodby Silverstein, which is known for its technological savvy. When the Wieden+Kennedy team locked themselves into a room to brainstorm the idea with Todd Mueller and Kylie Matulick of Psyop, the pieces began to fall into place.

"One of our reference points was a series of postcards from a particular valley in Australia that has this incredible lush, epic quality. We wanted to merge that fantasy landscape – kind of like the one in Lord of the Rings – with technology. It occurred to us that all of the creatures would have evolved to be perfectly adapted to their allotted tasks. After all, Coke is 120 years old in the real world – who knows how long that is in their time frame?"

Now functioning as a team, Wieden+Kennedy and Psyop began developing ideas for the characters that would populate the vending machine world. Many of the creatures had exaggerated human or animal features mashed up with machine elements. One of the most striking was a cross between a pig and a Chinook helicopter – soon christened a Chinoink – which would carry the bottle with its nipple rings. "You’ll notice there’s a slightly sado-masochistic element to the spot," laughs Hindman. "We also feed snowmen into a wood chipper. It all fit with our theory that the animation shouldn’t be too cute. A factory is hard work and these creatures are totally committed to imbuing the bottle with happiness. It’s a labour of love."

More than 15 animators and technicians worked on the spot, which took more than four months to bring to the screen. Wieden+Kennedy call it "an amazing collaborative process".

But the magic didn’t end there: audience responses to the film were overwhelmingly positive. Nobody at the agency was entirely prepared for the onslaught of enthusiasm that greeted its release. It was the number one film on the YouTube site for more than two weeks, single-handedly decimating notions that traditional advertising will lose out to Web 2.0.

"It’s certainly proof that advertising works if it’s entertaining," says Hindman. "And bear in mind that there is hardly a single frame in the spot where either the bottle or the Coke logo are not visible. The spot takes place in a universe where the Coke bottle is the local god."

More than anything, Happiness Factory is proof positive that award-winning advertising is not always about telling a joke. Surreal optimism works too.

Mark Tungate is the author of ADLAND: A Global History of Advertising, published by Kogan Page