From Performing Street Magic for Tips to Conquering the Digital World with Coca-Cola

By Marcos Amadeo – Co-founder
www.weareamaze.com/

In mid-2014, my friend and business partner, Julián Ávila, and I met to brainstorm new ideas. We were both professional illusionists and had been working together for a decade, performing our innovative shows for some of the world’s top companies across more than 20 countries.

We had met in the early 2000s, performing magic tricks for tips in bars around Plaza Serrano in Buenos Aires.

As usual, we gathered at our office to come up with new show ideas. However, that July morning was different. Julián showed up with an idea in his notebook that left me astonished. Although it wasn’t directly related to a magic show, it captured the same “wow effect” that a great trick delivers. It was fresh, original, and different.

The idea was a Christmas digital campaign that broke away from the traditional format. Instead of parents taking their children to a mall or fair to see Santa Claus, what if Santa visited the homes of Argentine families?

Julián detailed the concept: parents would become accomplices to surprise their children. The idea was simple yet powerful: parents would visit a website, fill out a short form with their child’s name, the reason Santa would congratulate them, and their phone number. Then, Santa would call the child, greet them by name, congratulate them, and even speak to them over the phone.

The idea was amazing, but we needed the right brand to bring it to life. We both agreed that Coca-Cola would be the perfect partner. So it fell to me to land a meeting with the world’s most iconic brand.

At first, I didn’t know who to contact. I didn’t know anyone inside Coca-Cola, so I googled “Coca-Cola Argentina Marketing” and found the name Diego Luis. Now I just needed his phone number or email.

I called Coca-Cola’s reception desk but feared they’d hang up once they heard I was a magician with an idea for a digital campaign. With a small white lie, I managed to get Diego’s email. I immediately wrote to him, introducing ourselves and briefly outlining our Christmas idea. He replied saying they already had a campaign developed for that year but invited us to send the information for review.

Worried that our idea might be misunderstood or simply ignored, we insisted on a face-to-face meeting. Diego kept asking us to send the email instead. After 27 emails and four months of persistence, we finally secured a meeting with Diego and Gonzalo Duperre at Coca-Cola’s old Buenos Aires HQ.

We presented our idea, and whether it was due to our passion or their vision, they gave us the green light to develop it. They warned us, though, that it would be a small campaign with no advertising budget, as all funds had already been allocated to their main Christmas campaign.

We held a casting to select Santa Claus and hired a fantastic makeup artist. Julián and I rented lights, cameras, and wrote the scripts ourselves, with no prior advertising experience. We built a set and filmed everything at our office on Freire Street. Altogether, we were just five people, including Santa Claus, Gonzalo, and Diego, who rotated throughout the shoot.

It was 23 nonstop hours of filming.

Coca-Cola’s expectations were simple: if we could get 1,000 users to complete the experience per day for 10 days, the campaign would be considered a success. Diego told us so.

On December 14, 2014, the campaign went live. As mentioned, there was no budget for advertising. Some friends and close contacts shared the campaign on social media, and the 1,000 daily experiences sold out in less than half an hour. From there, it grew exponentially and turned into a crazy success story.

Not only did we surpass the goal of 10,000 experiences, but we went way beyond: over 5 million experiences (all without spending a single peso on media buying).

We brought joy to millions of families together with Coca-Cola through a powerful idea, relentless persistence to be heard, and the bold vision of Diego Luis and Gonzalo Duperre, supported by their bosses Guillermo Giménez Brotons and Luis Gerardin.

In a matter of days, the entire country was talking about Coca-Cola’s Christmas campaign.

In the following months, we won 33 national and international marketing and advertising awards. Climbing up to the third floor of the Coca-Cola building on Paraguay Street and seeing almost three dozen trophies celebrating our campaign’s success filled us with pride.

Engineer Diego Pasjalidis wrote a book called Extreme Inspiration, where he shared our story, and it sold out in major bookstores across Latin America.

The following year, the campaign expanded to several Latin American countries and was produced at Televisa Studios in Mexico. We were no longer five people; we were almost a hundred.

Each year, the success repeated itself, improving both creativity and technology to deliver a unique and renewed experience every time. No other Coca-Cola digital Christmas campaign, at least in Latin America, has achieved such a profound impact on consumers or such remarkable results to this day.

Proof of this can be seen on the brand’s social media, where months in advance, users ask whether “Santa’s Call” will be available again.

“Santa’s Call” was our first major initiative and the launching pad for what would become our mission: developing AI-driven technology to connect brands with audiences through hyper-personalized videos. Eleven years later, we have completed around 850 projects for some of the world’s most prestigious companies.

I hope brands like Coca-Cola continue to have the boldness to create campaigns that truly connect with their audiences.

Creating a successful campaign isn’t about how much money you invest in advertising — it’s about doing something truly relevant for consumers.

And I hope there will continue to be people like Diego Luis, Gonzalo Duperre, Guillermo Giménez Brotons, Luis Gerardin, Marcos de Quinto, Ana Carrión, Mariana Manso, Úrsula Carpeña, Pilar Echeverría, Manuel Arroyo, and their respective teams — people who take risks, just like they did when they decided to listen to two illusionists who knew nothing about advertising, but who, for the next ten years, would be responsible for creating the most successful Coca-Cola Christmas digital campaign in history.