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Gigi Hadid Brings Coca-Cola Into the Kitchen for Real Magic
Coca-Cola's 'A Recipe for Magic from Gigi Hadid' is a 2023 film campaign that positions the beverage as an essential ingredient in shared meal experiences, running across Iceland and the United States as part of the brand's broader global Real Magic platform.
The campaign launched globally on March 4, 2023, according to coca-colacompany.com, with its hero film appearing in Great Britain on April 3, 2023, as reported by marketingdive.com. The Icelandic adaptation, titled 'Uppskrift að töfrum frá Gigi Hadid' — Icelandic for 'A Recipe for Magic from Gigi Hadid' — was published in Iceland and the United States in August 2023. The campaign comprises a single film asset, placing its entire communicative weight on one tightly constructed piece of storytelling.
Elif Kaypak, global brand marketing lead at The Coca-Cola Company, described the campaign as being built around three ingredients: 'the moment, the meal, and Coca-Cola,' as reported by marketingdive.com. That formulation captures the strategic architecture precisely. Rather than promoting the product through its functional qualities, Coca-Cola anchors the brand inside a culturally resonant ritual — the shared dinner table — and uses Gigi Hadid as the human expression of that ritual. In the 30-second film, Hadid prepares homemade pasta with friends before the group shares a Coca-Cola at the meal, according to coca-colacompany.com. The sequence is deliberately unhurried and intimate, more lifestyle editorial than conventional beverage advertising.
In the United States, the campaign ran across television, video-on-demand, cinema, out-of-home, and social media throughout April and May 2023, as reported by marketingdive.com. The Icelandic market received its own localised version, reflecting Coca-Cola's established practice of adapting global platforms to regional audiences. The Real Magic platform itself launched in September 2021, making it the brand's first new global marketing platform since 2016, according to coca-colacompany.com. 'A Recipe for Magic from Gigi Hadid' represents one of the most visible executions within that platform, earning a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100.
Coca-Cola structured the 'A Recipe for Magic' campaign around a consumer insight that positions shared meals as emotionally significant cultural moments. The strategic logic is straightforward: food occasions create sustained attention and positive affect, and a beverage brand that embeds itself inside that ritual earns associations that functional advertising cannot manufacture. By selecting Gigi Hadid — internationally recognised as both a fashion figure and a credible food personality — Coca-Cola bridges aspirational lifestyle imagery with the everyday accessibility of a shared dinner, targeting culturally and geographically diverse audiences in Iceland and the United States simultaneously.
The competitive context matters here. The global carbonated soft-drinks market exceeded more than $407 billion in 2023, with an approximate compound annual growth rate of 4.3% projected through 2033, according to researchandmarkets.com. Coca-Cola's principal rival PepsiCo continues to compete directly for meal-occasion positioning in the United States, while emerging premium soft-drink brands press on both companies from the category's upper end. Against that landscape, Coca-Cola's choice to invest in narrative filmmaking rather than price-led or feature-led advertising reflects confidence in brand equity as the primary competitive differentiator.
The Real Magic platform, as reported by coca-colacompany.com, was designed to celebrate the moments when human connection feels most real. The meal-occasion strategy operationalises that abstract brand promise with a concrete and repeatable scenario. Market-specific talent reinforced the same logic elsewhere in the global rollout — Yang Yang and Oscar Meza appeared in other regional adaptations, according to coca-colacompany.com — but Hadid's execution carried the greatest cross-market reach, running in both the United States and Iceland. The campaign's media mix, spanning television, video-on-demand, cinema, out-of-home, and social media as reported by marketingdive.com, ensured the narrative reached audiences across every major attention environment active in those markets during 2023.
Coca-Cola's 'A Recipe for Magic from Gigi Hadid' executes its storytelling through a single 30-second film, a constraint that demands economy and specificity in every creative decision. The film is built around a domestic scene: Gigi Hadid making homemade pasta with friends, the meal reaching its natural conclusion with a shared Coca-Cola, according to coca-colacompany.com. The choice of setting — a home kitchen rather than a stylised studio — signals a deliberate move toward warmth and authenticity over spectacle.
Creative development was led by WPP's bespoke Coca-Cola agency OpenX, with Cartwright leading the work, as reported by marketingdive.com. Supporting agencies included Ogilvy, Momentum Worldwide, and Mediacom, according to marketingdive.com, reflecting the scale of infrastructure required to execute a global platform adaptation across multiple markets including Iceland and the United States. The Icelandic-language version, retitled 'Uppskrift að töfrum frá Gigi Hadid,' demonstrates the campaign's localisation discipline: the core film and its emotional architecture remain intact, while language and market context are adapted for Icelandic audiences.
The narrative genre, identified in Clapboard's campaign classification, is the defining creative choice. The film does not demonstrate the product, explain its ingredients, or make a comparative claim. Instead it constructs a scene in which Coca-Cola appears as the natural, unhurried conclusion to a good evening. That structural decision — using story logic rather than advertising logic to introduce the product — aligns with the broader Real Magic platform's commitment to emotional resonance over direct persuasion, as described by Elif Kaypak of The Coca-Cola Company in reporting by marketingdive.com. The result is a piece of advertising that functions more as a short lifestyle film than a conventional beverage spot, which partly explains its deployment across cinema alongside television and digital channels.
The Icelandic adaptation of 'A Recipe for Magic from Gigi Hadid' recorded 45,107 views, 61 likes, and 5 comments on its published platform, according to Clapboard's archive data. No verified award wins for the campaign have been confirmed across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. Broader campaign-level performance metrics for the United States and Iceland markets — including reach, brand lift, or sales attribution figures — are not publicly available from coca-colacompany.com, marketingdive.com, or any other named source at the time of publication.
What the available data does illuminate is the structural conditions the campaign was built to exploit. A single-asset film campaign running across television, video-on-demand, cinema, out-of-home, and social media in both Iceland and the United States, as reported by marketingdive.com, concentrates all brand communication into one repeatable emotional impression. That approach carries both efficiency and risk: when the creative lands, frequency compounds its effect; when the creative does not fully connect, there is no secondary asset to recover ground. The 30-second duration is consistent with formats that research consistently identifies as sufficient for emotional narrative closure in video advertising, though no specific study is cited here for this execution.
The campaign's Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects competent execution of a culturally legible strategy — the meal-occasion positioning is well-supported, the talent selection is credible, and the narrative format is appropriate for the brand's Real Magic platform — while suggesting the execution stops short of the distinctiveness that separates canonical Coca-Cola advertising from solid category work. The absence of award recognition across major international shows is consistent with that assessment.
Coca-Cola's 'A Recipe for Magic from Gigi Hadid' is a 2023 film campaign featuring Gigi Hadid making homemade pasta with friends and sharing a Coca-Cola. Published in Iceland and the United States, it forms part of the brand's Real Magic global platform and positions Coca-Cola as central to shared meal moments, according to coca-colacompany.com.
Coca-Cola ran the campaign across Iceland and the United States. The global launch occurred March 4, 2023, with a Great Britain rollout on April 3, 2023, as reported by marketingdive.com. The Icelandic-language adaptation, titled 'Uppskrift að töfrum frá Gigi Hadid,' was published in August 2023, according to Clapboard's archive data.
WPP's bespoke Coca-Cola agency OpenX led creative development, with Cartwright directing the work, as reported by marketingdive.com. Supporting agencies included Ogilvy, Momentum Worldwide, and Mediacom. The campaign ran across television, video-on-demand, cinema, out-of-home, and social media in the United States and other markets.
Real Magic is Coca-Cola's global brand platform, launched in September 2021 as the brand's first new global platform since 2016, according to coca-colacompany.com. It centres on celebrating moments of genuine human connection. The Gigi Hadid film is one of its most prominent executions, anchoring the platform's meal-occasion strategy across Iceland and the United States.
No verified award wins for the campaign have been confirmed across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, according to Clapboard's research. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting solid strategic execution within the non-alcoholic drinks category without reaching award-level distinction.
Gigi Hadid combined international fashion visibility with an established public identity as a food enthusiast, making her a credible bridge between aspirational lifestyle imagery and the everyday warmth of a shared meal. Coca-Cola's global brand marketing lead Elif Kaypak described the campaign as built around three ingredients — the moment, the meal, and Coca-Cola — as reported by marketingdive.com.
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