Producer and distributor of soft drinks with presence in 180 countries around the world.
Introduction
Every four years, the same thing happens: the entire world stops to look in the same direction. For brands, the World Cup is not just a sporting event — it is the season of greatest collective emotion on the planet. And the question every sponsoring brand must answer is the same: how does that global emotion translate into a physical, tangible experience inside a supermarket?
Mickael Vinet, Vice President of Global Assets at The Coca-Cola Company, put it precisely when speaking about the connection between football and the brand: "Football has the extraordinary capacity to bring people together, no matter where they come from or what language they speak." That capacity for unity is also the greatest asset a brand can leverage at the point of sale during the World Cup season.
The challenge for Coca-Cola was to build far more than a seasonal display. They needed a space that would function as a meeting point inside the store: a piece that visually captured the passion of the fan, communicated the "Uncap the Emotion" campaign with the force of a large-format activation, and at the same time operated with the logistical efficiency that a massive nationwide rollout during the World Cup demands. Cardboard, not steel. Speed, not weeks of installation. Impact, not discretion.
The brand needed the supermarket to feel, for a moment, like an extension of the stadium.
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AIM designed, developed, and produced the AAA Island "Uncap the Emotion" for Coca-Cola: a large-format structure built entirely from corrugated cardboard, conceived to dominate the sales floor with the presence of a campaign activation — not a simple display.
The main structure is built from white corrugated cardboard flute B ECT 40, while the internal support grids use kraft corrugated flute BC ECT 42 — a combination that gives the piece the rigidity needed to hold real product without sacrificing the lightness that cardboard offers over metal. All printing is full-color direct on the cardboard, delivering to the campaign graphics — the fans, the players, the colors of the national team — the sharpness of a billboard at point-of-sale scale.
The island is made up of a complete system of components: two type-A banners and two type-B banners that function as the visual "goalposts" of the structure, six trays with their respective tray floors to hold product, four type-A and four type-B skirting panels with their skirting floors, eight type-A and eight type-B internal support grids, four headers that crown the piece, header side panels in two models, header fronts, and an extensive loader system — four of each type A1 through A4 and twelve of each type B1 through B4 — that multiply the product display points throughout the structure. Everything is completed with a floor graphic: a football pitch painted literally on the ground beneath the shopper's feet.
Assembly is done with pushpins and foam tape, a system designed to make in-store installation fast and tool-free — a critical factor when the task is installing hundreds of units simultaneously across the country before the tournament kicks off.
Product capacity is substantial: 120 bottles of 600 ml per tray, distributed across the six trays of the structure. And the final dimensions — 260 cm wide by 130 cm deep by 210 cm tall — confirm what the image already suggests: this is not a display, it is an installation. A piece that, by its sheer scale, becomes the visual reference point of any aisle where it is placed.
The installation of the AAA Island transformed, during the campaign season, the shopping experience at every point where it was placed.
The first effect was one of destination. A structure standing 2.10 meters tall, featuring graphics of celebrating fans and a pitch floor graphic, is not something shoppers pass by accident: they seek it out, circle it, photograph it. The island stopped being a display to walk past and became a destination inside the store — generating the kind of deliberate stop that no conventional shelf can provoke.
The second effect was one of emotional immersion. The combination of large-format banners, headers, side panels, and floor graphic wrapped the shopper in the "Uncap the Emotion" narrative from multiple angles at once. It was not seeing an advertisement: it was walking inside one. For a brand whose connection to football is built precisely on the idea of bringing people together around a shared passion, that level of immersion multiplied the resonance of the campaign message.
The third effect was one of deployment efficiency. Built from corrugated cardboard with a pushpin and foam tape assembly system, the island could be rolled out at scale without the time or costs associated with metal structures. This allowed Coca-Cola to activate the campaign across a significant number of points of sale simultaneously — right within the window of time when shopper attention toward everything World Cup-related is at its peak.
The fourth effect was real commercial capacity behind the visual impact. With 120 bottles per tray across six levels, the island did not sacrifice product volume for scenography: both coexisted within the same structure. The shopper drawn in by the experience found, immediately, the product available to take home.
The objective set from the beginning was met: Coca-Cola brought the emotion of the World Cup inside the supermarket, with a piece that combined scale, campaign narrative, and commercial capacity in a single installation.
What This Island Opens Up for Your Brand
For brands that sponsor large-scale events — sporting, cultural, or seasonal — and seek to translate that emotional connection to the point of sale, the Coca-Cola — AIM case traces a clear path.
High-grade corrugated cardboard makes it possible to build large-format pieces without the costs, timelines, or logistical constraints of metal, making mass deployment viable during campaign windows that are, by definition, brief.
A structure that combines immersive graphics, floor graphics, and multiple display levels turns the point of sale into a narrative space: the shopper does not just see the campaign — they inhabit it for a few seconds, and those seconds are what build brand recall.
Designing with simple assembly systems — pushpins, foam tape, modular components — is what allows an activation of this scale to be replicated across hundreds of stores without losing consistency or installation quality.
And above all, a campaign piece does not have to choose between visual impact and commercial capacity. The AAA Island proves that both can coexist: emotion draws the shopper in, and product converts them.
Does Your Next Campaign Deserve a Point-of-Sale Experience at This Scale?
At AIM, we design, develop, and produce large-format structures that turn brand activations into memorable experiences at the point of sale. Contact us and let's build together the installation your campaign needs.
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