A Diet Coke Can for You? Impossible now Possible

I want to do a retrospective about a project I was recently creative producer and technologist on, which was submitted to Cannes while I was working at Sawhorse, and which I am still very proud of. That is Diet Coke's "This Is My Taste."

I want to talk about this because when the project was first ideated, according to key members of our team, this had technically never been done before. We had to create a user flow where people could write in something they liked, get an image for it, then choose the Diet Coke logo color, and voila, they would get their own personalized can. But in the reality we live in, the options for things people like are near limitless. So we had to create countless images with GenAI that were also professional client grade, Diet Coke level here, and brand safe at the same time. I repeat, this had never been done before. But it was theoretically possible.

An ask like this can stall out fast. Coca-Cola saw the potential and backed us on it. Sawhorse also has a terrific creative standard, and the work the team does for brands is some of the best in the business. Now, how do you do the impossible?

Early on we all agreed on no real-time image creation. We had to pre-make the images to make sure everything was tightly moderated. So the creative team worked out what our specific target audiences would like, based on deep research into those users, and we eventually settled on five artistic choices: Pop Art, Collage, Minimalist, Crochet, and Street Art. From those we built the image styles, then rigged up a whole computer infrastructure to generate them at volume. From there we used AI and human moderation to bring that down to a curated library of hundreds of thousands. As one tester put it, they kept trying to stump the app and they could not do it. No matter what you wanted for your taste, you always got sharp options.

There is a very key takeaway from this process. Anything is now technically, theoretically possible. Or almost anything. AI is allowing information, and the ability to create with it, to become available to anyone no matter their skill level. Skill still matters, but things have flattened. AI is also making it so you can do never before things. So being creative now is looking at the world around you, studying the tech, and thinking about how the tech can bring new things to life. So much of what we think is not possible actually is possible, with some experimentation and R&D required of course.

So Diet Coke's "This Is My Taste" released and it did gangbuster numbers in Great Britain and later Ireland (can't say the numbers, sorry), and we made the video attached to this post, which I also creatively produced, as a way to celebrate it all. From that success, we submitted it to Cannes right after. The Cannes submission process was its own thing, with its own video and its own thought process for what it meant, which I will talk about someday. But to give you a hint, what also made "This Is My Taste" special was that for the user experience, no GenAI. We had a search function to find related images, and the final output was entirely the user's choice, not generated. So much of AI these days is either low grade demo imagery and video, or the AI controls the final output. For Diet Coke, every image was carefully curated and moderated to be safe and high quality across the board, and the user chose the imagery to be exactly what they wanted their custom Diet Coke can to be. We ended up creating a lot of real cans from this, a super special experience for so many people.

This was only my second interactive web app experience, the first was two months earlier, but once you understand how this new world of information and creation works, you can do the impossible. One of my proudest projects.