From bottle caps to loot boxes: a Coca-Cola promotion for gamers

Coca-Cola’s promotions are a flagship of its marketing in Brazil, and for years the studio had been helping move them online. I joined for “Pronto pra Jogar?”. The campaign just before it had recreated the much-loved bottle-cap prize draw, a mechanic Brazilian consumers already understood instinctively. My brief was to take that same proven mechanic and make the leap to a new audience and a new language: a loot box for the gaming community.

As Senior Product Designer I led UX, working alongside a UI designer and a product manager. The insight was that a loot box would read as native to gamers in the way bottle caps read to the wider public: a familiar ritual of randomised reward. So we translated the scratch-card draw into a loot-box opening, and built it on a modular structure and methodology that could carry the same mechanic across different topics and audiences rather than rebuilding each campaign from scratch.

The campaign hub featured on Big Brother Brasil 2022, reaching a national primetime audience. Beyond the campaign itself, the modular approach became a replicable template Coca-Cola reused across later promotions, which is the part I am proudest of: a one-off campaign that left a reusable system behind.