Coca-Cola Brand Attack Ad: Weekend

Holidays are coming

Production company Weekend decided to shoot a genius ad (a parody of the classic ‘Holidays Are Coming’ Coke video from 1995) in support of Greenpeace’s ocean plastics campaign. And to recreate some of the ‘Christmas magic’, they got us involved.

Weekend initially asked us just to light the truck at the centre of the ad, but as the storyboard developed, it became clear they needed something bigger. We were excited to help them deliver their vision, and worked quickly to adapt our designs to fit the fast turnaround time for the shoot.

It’s beginning to look a lot like…

We covered the truck in ‘faulty’ fairy lights – a low-rent version Coke’s shiny red trucks. But we also built designs based on subtle light changes and movement, with hundreds of fairy lights lighting up in sequence in time with the action. These implied the presence of the truck without it appearing on screen, saving it for a big reveal at the end.

The true meaning of Christmas

The ad ended up looking amazing, and Greenpeace were really happy with it. It’s now had over 3.5 million views across Facebook, and has made loads of headlines.  Weekend wanted their parody to hijack some of Coke’s PR push to encourage a conversation about the amount of plastic in our oceans, and we’re absolutely delighted our design helped them do that.

Bailes and Light are totally awesome! They designed and programmed all the practical lighting for our Greenpeace Christmas Campaign. They are a supremely creative duo, full of ideas, full of enthusiasm and genuinely working at the cutting edge of what’s possible with programmable lighting effects. Their attitude of ‘imagine first, work out how to make it possible second’ yielded some fantastic results and without them the final film would not have been nearly as successful.

Joe Churchill,
Creative Director, Weekend