Thirty years is long enough for practically everything to change. The city, the audience, the films we watch, the way we choose them. The phones we use to photograph the red carpet, the places where we meet before a screening, the people we come to the Festival with. Even that famous phrase, “See you at Metalac,” probably first appears in a WhatsApp group today.
And yet, every August, some scenes look strangely familiar. Sarajevo fills with people, the evenings become longer, the city moves to a different rhythm. Someone is rushing to a screening, someone else is just leaving the cinema, someone meets again in the same place after ten years, and somewhere within that picture, for three decades now, there has also been Coca-Cola.
This very feeling inspired this year’s “30 Summers, Same Scene” platform, through which Coca-Cola and the Sarajevo Film Festival marked thirty years of continuous partnership. Still, the anniversary was the occasion here, not the content. Because when the relationship between a brand and one of the region’s most important cultural events has lasted for so long, the task is no longer to explain that the partnership exists. The task is to find a way for thirty years of shared history to mean something to the audience standing in front of a billboard today, scrolling through Instagram, buying Coca-Cola at Bingo, boarding a tram or waiting for a film to begin.
The answer was found in the very simple insight that we remember the Festival through scenes from our own lives. The first films we watched, the first nights out, the people we met. Loves that began one August and those that perhaps did not make it to the next. Friendships that remained. A Sarajevo that looks the same to us for several days each year, even though we have changed quite considerably in the meantime.
The “30 Summers, Same Scene” campaign is not so much about the past of Coca-Cola and the Sarajevo Film Festival as it is about the continuity of the emotion they share with their audience.
Actress Helena Vuković, the face of the campaign, gives a human face to that very idea. The Festival is part of her personal coming of age, but also of her professional journey, so in the campaign she naturally represents the generations that grew up with SFF, changed and kept returning to it. And once the story was framed in that way, it would have been a shame to leave it on a single visual or in a single medium.
That is why this year’s Coca-Cola festival presence followed the audience throughout Sarajevo. On OOH surfaces and social media, through digital communication and influencers. At a branded station, on a tram and a trolleybus. In the refreshed Metalac Cinema, in retail, in the Coca-Cola App, at the Eating Point, in front of the cinema screen and in front of a vending machine. In other words, the campaign did what a good festival partner should do, it fully entered the rhythm of the Festival.
“Cheers to 30!” was its activation layer, the space in which the larger story of the partnership became a very concrete experience for consumers. In cooperation with Bingo, a tailor-made promotion was developed through the Coca-Cola App. By purchasing Coca-Cola Original Taste and Coca-Cola Zero Sugar products, scanning receipts and collecting Bubble points, consumers could win a VIP hospitality experience at the Sarajevo Film Festival and a range of Coca-Cola and SFF prizes, from suitcases, tote bags, bottles and T-shirts to umbrellas and Polaroid cameras. In this way, the Festival moved from the centre of Sarajevo into stores as well, while a traditional retail promotion gained a reason to become part of a broader story. During the Festival itself, this relationship became even more visible at the Coca Cola Eating Point across from Dom Armije. The place where hospitality vendors, music, performers and festival audiences have gathered for years also received its own small birthday ritual this year. A vending machine waited for the consumer to blow out its candles, and the wish was immediately granted in the form of a Coca-Cola can. It is precisely such emotional details that often make the greatest difference between branding a space and creating an experience someone will remember, record and recount the next day.
In the year in which Coca Cola Zero Sugar also received a refreshed visual identity, the Festival simultaneously became one of the important stages for presenting it to the public. A special place in the programme was also given to the film “No Man’s Land”, hosted by Coca-Cola. The audience watched the film with popcorn and Coca-Cola, in that familiar festival combination of the big screen and the completely ordinary pleasure that allows cinema to retain its magic.
“Thirty years of partnership with the Sarajevo Film Festival carry an enormous wealth of shared experiences and memories, but it was important to us not to view this anniversary through nostalgia. We wanted to speak the language of today’s audience and be present where the festival experience truly happens, in the city, in the cinema, in stores, on the phone, through encounters and socialising. ‘30 Summers, Same Scene’ speaks precisely about that special connection between Sarajevo, the Festival and the people who return to it year after year. We are proud of what we have built together over the past three decades, and especially of the fact that the continuation of our cooperation has already been confirmed through a new four-year agreement,” the Coca-Cola company stated.
This year’s execution brought together The Coca-Cola Company, Coca-Cola HBC BH Sarajevo, McCann Sarajevo, KTP Solutions and the Sarajevo Film Festival, meaning several different teams and areas of expertise that had to function as a single unit. And judging by everything we saw on the ground, the audience ultimately decided that the combination worked.
The campaign’s performance was tracked through digital reach and engagement, the results of influencer content, use of the Coca-Cola App, scanned receipts and the Bubble mechanism, prize redemption, reactions to festival activations and attendance across various Coca Cola touchpoints. What its different points of contact already provide is a more interesting picture of a partnership that, after thirty years, has managed to avoid the trap of its own history. It looked at the audience of 2026, people who now find films on their phones, keep money in a digital wallet, post a photograph from the Festival before the screening is over, collect Bubble points through an app, and then still, just like the generations before them, gather in front of the cinema, pick up a Coca-Cola, sit beneath the open sky and wait for the lights to go out. Thirty summers later, the scene is clearly still a good one.
