Case Study: Coca‑Cola achieves viral, interactive 100th‑birthday bottle campaign with Microsoft Azure Cortana Intelligence

Celebrating the 100th Birthday of the Coca-Cola Bottle with Cortana Intelligence

The Coca‑Cola Company celebrated the 100th anniversary of its iconic contour bottle and wanted a fresh, 21st‑century social experience that connected the brand to consumers’ personal stories. The challenge was to create a playful, shareable campaign that used modern analytics and image recognition to engage global audiences across social media.

Coca‑Cola partnered with Microsoft to adapt the viral How‑Old.net experiment (which had reached millions of users) using Cortana Intelligence and Cognitive Services to detect bottles and estimate ages from user photos. When the app recognized a bottle with a visible logo it highlighted the image, invited sharing, and directed users to learn more about the bottle—turning advanced machine learning into a highly engaging, interactive campaign that reinforced the bottle’s cultural relevance and brought the brand into consumers’ everyday stories.

Coca-Cola

Simon Cowart

Global Social Media Strategist