The chase may have concluded Sunday night, but “Mirage” characters will live on.
While the team from Baltimore took home the championship Sunday night, a cast of Showgirls raced to a victory of their own. They bested their desert rivals, the Cowboys and the Badlanders, in a quest to be first to reach an ice-cold Coke.
To propel them to the finish line, fans casted nearly 910,000 votes, almost 7.3 million sabotages and virtually three million YouTube views, bringing active fan engagement with the campaign to top 11 million in the process—figures that surpassed past all internal projections.
Over one million fans visited CokeChase.com to vote for the characters they liked best. More impressively, those visitors stayed on the site, each participating in an average of eight “sabotages” against opposing factions. While the company anticipated fewer than one million total sabotages, nearly 7.3 million were performed. In addition, more than 86,000 mentions of the campaign were tracked across various social media platforms.
“We hoped our characters would come to life in such a way that fans would want to rally behind their favorite team, but we are thrilled by the success of the active engagement resulting from this year’s campaign,” said Pio Schunker, senior vice president, integrated marketing communications, Coca-Cola North America Group. “Fans flocked to CokeChase.com to vote and sabotage in numbers far beyond the aggressive performance goals we had in place.”
In addition to being seen by more than 100 million broadcast viewers, “Mirage” was watched online nearly three million times, exceeding the 1.7 million cumulative views of the company’s Polar Bowl spots in 2012. And while the spot was created as the centerpiece of a Big Game campaign, it doesn’t end with the final whistle.
“The characters featured in our Big Game ad, ‘Mirage,’ generated such a groundswell of support from fans, we’re not ready to say good-bye to them just yet,” said Schunker. “The unique nature of ’Mirage’ and the consumer engagement it generated during our campaign—especially in active experiences, versus passive experiences as in last year’s Polar Bowl—makes it a repeatable idea that will live on long after yesterday’s game.”
The 30-second payoff ad featuring the Showgirls’ CokeChase victory immediately after the game will air on Feb. 6 and 7 during American Idol. It will be joined by a Kalaharian Epilogue, which features “Mirage” character Vincent De Fairweather, on cable networks this week. In addition, moviegoers will begin seeing Mirage in cinema beginning in March.
