The POP Identity
Pop-art quadrants wrapping the iconic Coca-Cola bottle. Popcorn, hearts, hashtags, stars. The seed everything else grew from.
Role · The visual system that defined the activation.
Coca-Cola · CinemaCon 2023 · Caesars Palace
After 15 years working inside Coca-Cola's brand guidelines, we got the call no agency expects. Come to Atlanta. We want you to design the Key Visual yourselves.
Coca-Cola has been the presenting sponsor of CinemaCon for years. CinemaCon is the largest gathering of movie theater owners in the world. In 2023, the call was different.
We were asked to design the entire sponsorship: trade show booth, VIP lounge, closing night party, and every piece of ancillary branding across Caesars Palace. And to design it around something we'd never been asked to deliver in a decade and a half of work with the brand.
A global icon usually means working inside the brand guidelines. Logo here, color there. This brief inverted that. The client wanted a fresh creative direction, and trusted us to find it.
The client flew us to the Coca-Cola Brand Vault. A hundred and twenty-five years of the brand's most iconic packaging, ad campaigns, design archives, and pop-culture artifacts, all under one roof.
We left with an unusual responsibility: create the Key Visual for CinemaCon 2023 from scratch. No template. No "use this logo here." Design the visual identity for the event itself.
The breakthrough came inside the Vault. The bottle isn't just a logo. It's a movie still. Pop-art patterns wrapping the most recognizable shape on Earth, fragmented across cinema-themed quadrants. POP stopped being a tagline. It became the design system the rest of the activation could grow from.
The POP key visual did its job. It became a system. One visual language carried across every touchpoint of the Coca-Cola presence at CinemaCon, from the trade show floor to the closing night dance floor.
Pop-art quadrants wrapping the iconic Coca-Cola bottle. Popcorn, hearts, hashtags, stars. The seed everything else grew from.
A walk-in, multi-day immersive space on the show floor. POP-tile archway, branded modules, and a multi-sensory journey for attendees.
Art Deco refinement for the premium moments, plus elevators, lightboxes, hallway banners, and floor graphics extending the POP system across Caesars Palace.
LED dance floor, POP-tile archway over the DJ, themed photo booth, bottle-cap dessert bar. The activation peaking at full party scale.
The key visual landed. With attendees, with Coca-Cola employees, with external guests. It became the look and feel that defined the activation. And it proved that fifteen years of partnership had earned a new kind of trust.
A global icon's brand guidelines exist for good reasons. We've followed them for fifteen years. Once in a while a client gives you the chance to write the next page yourself. CinemaCon was one of those. The key visual we designed in Atlanta became the spine of every surface at the show, from the trade booth to the LED dance floor.