The Thinnest Vending Machine in the World.

Diet Coke has always fit seamlessly into people's lives. The Slender Vender made that idea physical - a vending machine so impossibly slim it could appear anywhere Paris could: bridges, archways, plazas, the spaces between. An object that didn't just sell Diet Coke, but embodied it.

The Idea

Experiential marketing in the soft drinks category had a familiarity problem - sampling events, branded pop-ups, the usual mechanics of getting product into hands. The Slender Vender bypassed all of that by starting with the product's own personality.

Diet Coke is slim. Effortless. It goes everywhere and fits into every lifestyle without asking for attention. So the activation became an expression of exactly that: a vending machine designed to be the thinnest in the world, placed in locations a standard vending machine could never reach. The medium was the message - and the message was Diet Coke.

Paris as Stage

The activation launched in Paris - a city that doesn't suffer intrusive brand activity lightly, which made the Slender Vender's reception all the more telling. Placed in some of the city's most architecturally distinctive locations, the machine stopped people mid-stride. Not because it was loud, but because it was unexpected and oddly elegant - a sleek silver column where nothing like it had any right to be.

The content film captured real Parisians discovering it: the double-take, the curiosity, the moment of delighted confusion. No actors. No scripted reactions. The machine did the work.

The Slender Vender in situ - Pont de Bir-Hakeim and the banks of the Seine, Paris

The Object

The machine itself was the creative work. Designed from scratch to be functional at a width no vending machine had achieved before, it dispensed Diet Coke in its iconic slim can - the proportional echo between product and machine entirely intentional. Seeing one for the first time, you understood the brand before reading a word.

Recognition

• London International Awards2013