Firefox compatible.

Client: Coca-Cola Company
Creative Agency: JUXT Interactive

The NESTEA ICE site was created to help build awareness for a new Ready to Drink tea beverage from Nestea. The product is unique, in that it has a cooling ingredient that actually subtly numbs your mouth when you drink it. They developed the tag line "Absurdly Cold," and this served as the positioning point for the site. We wanted to create a site that had a novel and comical tone with fun and somewhat absurd content. The target audience is college-age males and females, so we tried to create some entertaining and viral content that this demographic would share with friends.  Enhancing the interactivity, we built a custom T-shirt application with street level cool design to make the brand more relevant to the youth culture.

The Ice splash video with El Yielazo is a big success; we have had phenomenal feedback on that. That is actually mostly all JUXT staff in that piece. The main character is Brian Miller, a JUXT designer and one of the most mellow people you can meet. But he really took on a new persona when he put on the Mexican wrestler outfit.

We did the concepts for the Ice'n spots (and art directed the puppetry and video shoot), and feel these are also very strong assets to convey the brand message. We are currently working on a game with the Ice'n character, which we feel will finish out that section, in the end making it much stronger.

Finally, the custom T-shirt app is a pretty big application. You can really create some interesting stuff with it if you give it a try.

Our thinking started with the essence of the product, tea -- by its nature providing consumers with a refreshing lift. Then we took into account the novelty factor of the cooling agent, bringing us to the tagline, "absurdly cold." We were confident that the order of the day would be "unconventional." We decided to make the experience this fly-thru, space thing, conveying themes of crisp, cool ocean breezes. It also allowed us to play with animation, interactivity and audio in a way that would make the site quirky and fresh.

The pervasive feedback has been, "I love this site," and the videos are ridiculous. We launched without banners or press in a soft launch just a week ago, and at the end of Day One we had exceeded Coca-Cola's average site visits for most sites. It has been blogged all over the world, and already honored by several design authorities (Macromedia, Favourite Site of the Day, Comm Arts).  But most importantly, it has gotten an unknown product some amazing brand awareness. Traffic has been so good that we have had to readdress the video streaming solution to keep up.
-- Todd Purgason, creative director, JUXT Interactive

 

 

 

The Nestea ICE microsite is one of those projects that must have been a joy to work on. Wonderful illustration combined with quirky viral video content, all unified by a Monty Pythonesque animation style give this site a uniqueness not often found on the web. The attention to detail in all aspects of the project, from sound design to interactivity, seems as though it probably reflects both the fun and passion the developers must have had for the project. The more you watch, the more you're immersed. Finding all the Easter Eggs on this site is half the fun. For Nestea, this is the most effective way to engage audiences in the brand. It's not over-the-top salesy, yet it still has a point and serves to extend the brand's image as a refreshing alternative to traditional colas. Nice balance. Great Work!

-- Adam Boozer, VP of creative, IQ Interactive

www.nesteaice.com proves you don’t need photo shoots and film to over-stimulate a web audience. This site does it with clever writing, solid Flash animation, strong illustration, rich audio and found photography, all brought together to buoy the visitor along through a retro-postcard-in-lollipop-land sort of world. No matter where you go, a popped-open Nestea is freaking somebody out in short animated vignettes. My favorite: the shark with the head of a shouting mustachioed man.

The site has one of the best custom T-shirt design builders I’ve ever seen. You’re instructed to print the T-shirt designs onto iron-on paper, which is not so great -- I mean, who has iron-on paper sitting around on their printer? (A connection to www.cafepress.com might help get more T-shirts made.) But the most frustrating thing here was that Mr. man-headed shark wasn’t in the T-shirt image library.

There’s a small slew of video, including some TV spots about a rapping ice cube/puppet. The site doesn’t expand on these TV spots’ storyline and that’s fine. Nestea Ice’s messaging is so off-the-wall, the deviation feels natural. Even the bit about the masked wrestler fits in by being out of place (and by having him dump ice on people).

The “freeze the sheep” game on the loading page is where the user interaction relates most closely to the brand message (Nestea Ice has supernatural freezing skills). It’s simple, but addictive and a dead-on message. It would be nice to see more of that kind of on-message interaction across the site. I really want to freeze more stuff. Making T-shirts and navigation that floats us through the sky don’t relate as much to the message, but I didn’t mind.

Overall, www.nesteaice.com is so packed with brand relevant weirdness that you have to applaud it. And I also have to rise and applaud the man-headed shark -- he truly is an inspiration to us all (and by “all,” I mean me). If only I could get him on a T-shirt.
-- Brian Linder, art director, Click Here