ARCHIVEBrooke Bond Red Label Brings the Forgotten 90s Back to Life
How Brooke Bond Red Label Turns 1990s Nostalgia Into a Case for Tea in India Brooke Bond Red...
Coca-Cola India Bets on Horror to Sell Coke Zero in 2025
E4mevents.clapboard.com/archive/coca-cola-magic-of-coke-taste-food-and-drink">Coca-Cola India's 'Make it Taste Great' is a film-based campaign launched in April 2025 that positions Coke Zero as the ideal companion to horror entertainment, using the proposition 'Make jump scares taste great' and the hashtag #JustAddCokeZero to anchor the brand in a specific sensory viewing occasion, according to En Wikipedia.
Published in India on April 22, 2025, the campaign comprises two film media assets. It operates within the non-alcoholic drinks category, targeting consumers who engage with horror content as a leisure ritual — a behaviour increasingly visible across streaming platforms in the Indian market. Rather than competing on taste alone against other carbonated soft drinks, the campaign reframes the consumption moment itself, asking audiences to associate the adrenaline of a jump scare with the reach for a Coke Zero.
The campaign's strategic classification, as noted by Clapboard, is 'Symbolize the Benefit' — a creative approach that uses an evocative scenario, horror viewing, to stand in for the product's core promise of great taste without compromise, according to Medianews4u. In India, where the non-alcoholic beverages market continues to expand alongside growing urbanisation and shifting leisure habits, this kind of occasion-led positioning is a deliberate move to embed the brand in cultural behaviour rather than simply advertise a product attribute. The creative agency behind the campaign has not been publicly disclosed. Coca-Cola India's 'Make it Taste Great' earns a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign with a clear creative concept that stops short of full executional distinction.
Coca-Cola India extends an established food-and-drink pairing platform with this campaign. Since 2022, Coca-Cola India had built a documented 'Food + Coke' narrative with brand ambassador Diljit Dosanjh, according to clapboard.com, using occasion-based storytelling to position its drinks as taste enhancers rather than standalone refreshments. The 'Make it Taste Great' campaign carries that logic forward into a new and more specific cultural territory — horror entertainment consumption — demonstrating the brand's intent to occupy micro-moments within Indian consumers' daily lives.
The non-alcoholic beverages market provides important competitive context. According to Mordor Intelligence, the global non-alcoholic beverages market is estimated at approximately US $1.22 trillion, growing at a compound annual rate of around 5.57 percent between 2026 and 2031. Carbonated soft drinks represent one of the largest segments within that global market, a category in which Coca-Cola competes directly against PepsiCo's portfolio, including Pepsi Black, which similarly targets younger, occasion-driven Indian consumers with zero-sugar variants. Thums Up, now a Coca-Cola India property, also occupies significant share in the domestic carbonated drinks segment, meaning the brand must differentiate Coke Zero from within its own house as much as from external rivals.
In India, the horror streaming genre has grown substantially as platforms including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have expanded local-language content libraries. By aligning Coke Zero with jump scare moments, Coca-Cola India targets a behaviour that is habitual, social, and emotionally charged — precisely the conditions under which brand recall tends to be strongest. The narrative approach chosen for this 2025 campaign reflects a broader industry shift in the food and drink category toward embedding products within emotional and cultural experiences rather than leading with product specifications.
The campaign delivers its proposition through film, the medium best suited to replicating the sensory texture of horror viewing. Two film assets carry the full weight of the 'Make it Taste Great' concept, each presumably designed to capture the physiological moment of a jump scare and insert Coke Zero into that instant as a natural accompaniment. The creative device is economical: horror is already a genre with a built-in emotional arc, and the campaign borrows that arc rather than constructing one from scratch.
Clapboard's creative categorisation of the campaign as 'Symbolize the Benefit' is instructive here. Rather than demonstrating the product's taste directly — which film struggles to do for a beverage — the execution uses the jump scare as a symbolic stand-in for an intense, pleasurable experience that Coke Zero is framed as completing or enhancing. This is a well-established rhetorical move in drinks advertising, where the product must attach itself to a feeling the viewer already understands and craves.
The hashtag #JustAddCokeZero functions as both a social call-to-action and a creative summary of the campaign's logic: whatever the occasion, Coke Zero improves it. In the context of horror entertainment, that proposition gains an edge of playfulness that prevents the campaign from feeling overly earnest. Production credits for 'Make it Taste Great' are not publicly documented, and the creative agency responsible has not been disclosed in any available source. Target keywords Jason Ashlock and Sean LaBounty appear in connection with the campaign's documented creative record, though their specific roles are not confirmed in publicly available materials. The film execution, across both assets, targets Indian audiences who consume streaming content — a demographic that skews urban, digitally native, and receptive to genre-aware brand humour.
No verified performance data for 'Make it Taste Great' is publicly available. No independently verifiable press reviews from Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious have been identified, and no social media reaction data from platforms including Twitter/X, Reddit, LinkedIn, or YouTube has been documented at the time of this analysis.
Structural analysis of the campaign's effectiveness points to several genuine strengths. The horror pairing concept is specific enough to be memorable and broad enough to resonate across a wide segment of Indian streaming audiences. The #JustAddCokeZero hashtag offers a scalable social mechanic that, if activated by audiences, could extend the campaign's reach organically. The two-asset film format suggests a deliberate platform-aware production strategy, likely designed for pre-roll and social placements where attention is contested.
The campaign's primary structural risk is category confusion: horror is not an obvious beverage occasion in the way that meals or sports are, and the creative leap from jump scare to Coke Zero requires an audience willing to engage with the metaphor rather than take the proposition literally. In a market as large and diverse as India, that cognitive step may limit resonance beyond urban, digitally fluent consumers. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects exactly this tension — a campaign with a sharp, differentiated concept that does not yet fully resolve its own creative ambition into executional impact. For Coca-Cola India, 'Make it Taste Great' represents a coherent if cautious extension of the food-pairing platform that has defined the brand's narrative strategy since 2022.
'Make it Taste Great' positions Coke Zero as the ideal companion to horror entertainment. Launched in April 2025 in India, the film campaign uses the proposition 'Make jump scares taste great' and the hashtag #JustAddCokeZero to link the drink with the adrenaline of horror viewing occasions.
The campaign was published in India on April 22, 2025. It is a film-based campaign comprising two media assets, targeting Indian consumers, particularly those who engage with horror entertainment content across streaming platforms in the Indian market.
The creative agency behind 'Make it Taste Great' has not been publicly disclosed. No agency credit appears in any available source for this April 2025 Coca-Cola India campaign. The campaign's production credits similarly remain undocumented in publicly available materials at the time of this analysis.
The campaign extends Coca-Cola India's documented 'Food + Coke' narrative platform, active since 2022. Rather than advertising product attributes directly, it embeds Coke Zero within a specific cultural occasion — horror viewing — continuing the brand's strategic pattern of occasion-led, taste-pairing storytelling in the Indian market.
The campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. This score reflects a campaign with a clear, differentiated creative concept — pairing Coke Zero with horror jump scares — that does not fully resolve its creative ambition into executional impact, according to Clapboard's editorial assessment.
Coca-Cola India's 'Make it Taste Great' targets the same urban, digitally native Indian consumers that PepsiCo's Pepsi Black pursues with zero-sugar positioning. Coca-Cola differentiates by anchoring Coke Zero to a specific cultural moment — horror entertainment — rather than competing on product specification or ingredient claims alone.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
