Early last week, Coca-Cola unveiled a clever new ad campaign, called “CokeChase,” where consumers can vote online during the Super Bowl to decide who among a group of characters in a 60-second Coke commercial will “win” a coveted bottle of the soft drink. It’s a post-modern twist on “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, if you will. Coke is spending a fortune promoting the campaign, including a big YouTube “take-over” on January 23rd. But, with all of the other Super Bowl buzz going on, will it work?

Since the campaign’s launch, we began studying awareness and reaction to the campaign across our platform, surveying exactly 40,027 US consumers between January 22 and the moment this blog post was published. If you looked at the first week of results, you may have wondered if Coke was happy with their marketing efforts:

This first wave of responses looked bleak. When reweighted to represent the US population, only 9% of consumers had heard of the campaign and only 4% had formed any kind of opinion about it (We should note that Coke likely targeted this campaign at specific demographic groups, so the “All-US” population might not be as relevant. That said, the numbers were shockingly consistent across age, gender, and race variables). The numbers barely moved at all during that first week.

But then, let’s look at the most recent numbers:

Now this should make Coke smile. In just the past 24 hours, we have seen a remarkable spike in overall awareness and reaction to the campaign.  Among the most recent 2,861 respondents (also weighted to the full US population), 19% had heard about the campaign, a 90% jump from the prior wave of results. The number of people who say they are planning to participate also leapt from 1% to 6%, a massive 6X increase in just a few days, while those who said they aren’t interested only ticked up a single point.

To highlight this even further, look at the time view below. This shows the percentage of people who said “I haven’t seen or heard anything…” from January 22 through today. Normally this is rendered in our software itself so you can scroll over the chart to see dates and times…but for now take our word for it. The drop (which is a good thing for Coke) is impossible to miss.

We’re not fully in-tune with the advertising universe and we’re too busy writing code around here to watch much TV or YouTube. We did hear rumblings that Coke took a little heat the other day for some perceived racial insensitivity in the video. If that had anything to do with these numbers moving so much, then it certainly validates the whole “All press is good press” mantra.

In any event, kudos to Coke and their ad agency for a campaign that actually seems to be working (at least so far). If these numbers hold steady or get any better between now and Sunday, they better have their web servers cranking at full speed during the game. “CokeCrash” is too easy of a headline to write.