Marketing is all about making your product or service stand out, and engaging potential customers is often the key to catching attention. A fitting example of innovative marketing is Coca-Cola’s extensive partnership with League of Legends, one of the world’s most popular games. In a series of marketing initiatives, they connected the enthusiastic audience of one of the world’s most popular games with the iconic fizzy beverage.

In this case, we’ll explain how we helped Tool, a pioneering creative technology studio, by supporting and scaling their immersive visual experience for Coca-Cola and League of Legends based on advanced artificial intelligence deep fake technology. Let’s dive in!

An Immersive Experience

As part of their long-term partnership with Riot Games, Coca-Cola entrusted Tool to design a cinematic experience for their customers, which involved the introduction of the special edition Coke Ultimate flavour. The idea was to pay tribute to the thrill of gaming and the moments when gamers reach their full potential.

Tool accepted their challenge and started working on an immersive experience that incorporated innovative technologies such as ‘one shot’ deepfake technology, AI-generated avatars, and a custom cloud computing stack. At the centre of this experience was their purpose-built backend pipeline, which ensured a hassle-free user experience.

Tool also took particular care to make deepfake technology more inclusive. During casting and while training the deepfake model, they broadened its parameters to accommodate a wider diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, and skin complexion.

A Global Campaign

Of course, launching a viral marketing campaign on a global scale comes with its own set of unique challenges. The most immediate challenge was facilitating an immersive experience for many League of Legends fans simultaneously, often spurred by promotions through influencers and events. To handle these sudden surges in demand, we worked together with Tool to set up a robust serverless architecture.

Another result of the marketing campaign’s global nature was that this project featured partners from the United States, Europe, and Asia. This globe-spanning collaboration added another layer of complexity to the project’s planning and execution.

Scaling for Success

Quickly after launching the campaign, we noticed that it exceeded expectations, attracting far more visitors than Coca-Cola had anticipated. Unfortunately, this success also induced a slowdown in the external API responsible for generating the deepfake content, leading to disruptions and timeout errors across the pipeline. To meet the substantial increase in traffic, we swiftly devised several measures together with Tool.

For example, we produced a quick initial fix by having the pipeline reset whenever an error surfaced. While this resulted in some temporary inconvenience for users already in the pipeline, it prevented the entire system from grinding to a halt and avoided users from assuming the experience had gone offline.

As a more long-term solution, Tool also proposed to set up a dedicated landing page. While users waited on the entire deepfake video, they already received a still image to share with their friends and followers. The landing page also gave users a dedicated link, so they could return and visit the results at their own leisure.

Together with other minor fixes, optimisations, and additional infrastructure, we guaranteed that League of Legends’ dedicated fans still received the personalised experience they were looking for.

Conclusion

Behind every successful global campaign, there is a team of close collaborators. While this ambitious project certainly posed some interesting challenges from time to time, it also highlights the importance of communication when working together across borders.

By using innovative technologies and quick problem-solving skills, we managed to deliver an engaging and immersive global marketing experience for Coca-Cola and Riot Games together with Tool and their agency Virtue Worldwide. We’ll make sure to keep the lessons learned from this project in mind for our future endeavours!