WASEEM SHAIKH

Over-caffeinated communications professional with a handful of awards, a headful of ideas, and an insatiable hunger to connect with people.

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Coca-Cola - Vaisakhi

Vaisakhi is a North Indian harvest festival, celebrated by Sikh and Hindu Punjabis.

When Coca-Cola Canada first decided to activate the festival in 2017, the retail space was already saturated with the usual festive tactics. With a budget too small to drown out the noise, we were tasked with crafting a creative approach to connect with Punjabi-Canadians over a key holiday period.

Sikhs are a historically underrepresented group in South Asian media. Geo/Demo insights also informed us that Punjabi-Canadians tend to live in suburban clusters (mainly Brampton, ON and Surrey, B.C.).

We proposed an OOH campaign targeting the Punjabi-populated suburbs across Ontario and B.C. Instead of simply wishing our audience "Happy Vaisakhi", however, we decided to treat the billboards like any mainstream Coca-Cola advertisement, with one notable exception: This was Coca-Cola's first North American campaign to feature a turban-clad Sikh.

For audiences celebrating Vaisakhi, the timing and placement of the billboards made the connect with the holiday. For anyone else, it worked as a regular Coke ad.

The gesture won hearts almost immediately, being picked up by press and social media not only in Canada, but also across the U.K., U.S. and India. In the end, the micro-budget campaign was amplified by over 4 million earned media impressions, making Vaisakhi a memorable occasion for Coca-Cola Canada.


Credits:
Agency: McCann Canada
Creative Director: Waseem Shaikh
Group Account Director: Meghna Srinivas
Photographer: Blake Morrow