For brands, logos are sacrosanct items, painstakingly developed, not to be messed with. 75% of people recognise a brand by its logo.

Coca-Cola has crushed its logo. The campaign by Open X New York highlights the brand’s recycling efforts. Coca-Cola and Open X realised that by altering one of the most recognisable logos in the world could make people aware of the importance of recycling Coca-Cola’s bottles and cans.  

The global OOH campaign, Recycle Me, launched in Latin America and is running in OOH and DOOH sites in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, as well as in print advertising and social. Other markets are slated to follow.

To create the crushed logos, the Ogilvy X creative team used mechanical presses and vacuums to physically crush cans and capture the real distortions to the famous logo. Each execution therefore features a different version of a crushed can, representing all the ways a can be crushed for recycling. A film documenting the process will launch later this month.

The effort supports Coca-Cola’s World Without Waste strategy, promoting the idea that sustainability is a collective responsibility and to encouraging recycling on a mass scale. The company is aiming to make all of its packaging recyclable by 2025 and wants to achieve a one-to-one collection and recycling rate by 2030.