A look at the Coca-Cola Spiced Shop’s exterior transition.
Artificial intelligence has come for your taste buds. Rather than bubbling up a traditional sampling campaign for its new Spiced flavor, Coca-Cola celebrated the product’s North American debut by leaning on AI. From March 1-2 at New York City’s ELM, Coke activated a vibrant “Spiced Shop” experience and art installation that fused genAI and artistic expression—a first for the brand.
As part of the broader “It’s This” Coca-Cola Spiced campaign, the Spiced Shop invited consumers to use a genAI tool that was trained on artistic expression to articulate what they taste and feel when sipping the new flavor. The activation yielded each participant a personalized “visual manifestation” of the sampling experience in the form of psychedelic-looking artwork that matched the campaign’s color scheme.
The two-floor pop-up featured wall-to-wall screens that turned the space into an ever-changing, crowdsourced artwork that was populated by participants’ AI creations as soon as they were generated. Thousands of unique GIFs were created over the activation’s two-day run.
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To add some celebrity sparkle to the program, Coke also teamed up with actress and entrepreneur Storm Reid, who used the genAI tool to formulate her own expression of the Spiced flavor. Then over several days, the brand worked with production artists and fabricators to bring her artistic vision to life on the exterior of the Spiced Shop, transforming the building and stopping passersby in their tracks.
“Instead of simply describing a flavor to consumers, the ‘It’s This’ campaign builds intrigue by inviting them to visualize a Coca-Cola Spiced taste experience that is uniquely their own,” says Amy Manganiello, senior creative director at Coca-Cola Trademark North America. “The Spiced Shop and our collaboration with Storm Reid put this idea in the hands of consumers. It’s a completely novel way to drive trials of the product, and a new use-case for AI as a tool to enhance creativity.”
Don’t worry if you didn’t make it to the Spiced Shop. Coca-Cola is still offering consumers a chance to craft their own Spiced-inspired AI art by visiting spicedshop.com. Agencies: Momentum Worldwide, Spiced Shop; Cartwright, “It’s This.”
More Scenes from the Spiced Shop:
Photos: Courtesy of Momentum Worldwide
