Coca-Cola Breaks Guinness Record by Connecting Millions of Chinese Families in Dragon Year Celebration

To own and elevate a cultural moment in Chinese New Year - the most significant celebration for the Chinese, uniting family members through a variety of rituals for more than 3,500 years.

With China’s recent societal challenges such as pandemic isolation and grind culture, young Chinese individuals have begun to value genuine connections with their families more. However, expressing such appreciation and love can often be difficult for many Chinese due to cultural nuances. Coca-Cola is known for fostering family connections over festive meals during CNY, and this year, WPP Open X, led by EssenceMediacom and supported by Ogilvy, assisted Coca-Cola with their aim to make this gesture effortless and unite more families on a much larger scale.

We identified "making sincere wishes to my family" as one of the key culture moments in this year's Chinese New Year celebration where Coca-Cola can make a real difference.
To do this, Coca-Cola embraced the centuries-old tradition of paper cutting to celebrate Chinese New Year and bring luck. Working with a GenZ paper cut artist who designed a special dragon pattern, Coca-Cola then employed AI technology to make sending wishes fun, connecting and rewarding in a multitude of ways.

Our consumers just had to: Scan Coke’s limited Dragon can, enter the wechat mini-program social CRM platform, receive a digital Red Envelope - a popular CNY tradition. Next, make a wish to their family! Then simply share their photo and New Year wishes, AI transformed them into traditional "paper art" portraits that could actually speak in their chosen voice/tone.

All paper-cut portraits, which carried people's wishes to loved ones, were virtually connected into the Coca-Cola Chinese New Year dragon – which also enabled people to identify where their wishes were located within this virtual paper dragon.
Altogether 1,053,075 people participated in forming this New Year auspicious dragon with AI, co-created by Coca-Cola and consumers, symbolizing hopes and reunions for the Dragon Year. This incredible result was recognized by Guiness World Records for the most online contributions to a digital artwork.

The results speak for themselves: