Does your campaign need a translator?

I absolutely love the “WWHSN?” (Where Will Happiness Strike Next?) campaign by Coca-Cola. To begin with, “Open Happiness” (along with “Live Positively”) is just a nice, simple, powerful slogan, and they were able to support it in such a cool way.

You were probably one of the nearly 3.3 million people who saw the first video of the Coca-Cola “Happiness Machine” placed on a college campus. There is no way you can watch it without a smile.

Now they have over 30 more videos from nine countries around the world. One of their latest is from Brazil where they converted a delivery truck into a Happiness Machine:

But as I was watching the WWHSN videos I noticed something– Even though most of the videos had some text to introduce the idea or location, you don’t have to read it to enjoy it. This video from Japan brought me to that realization:

When I first watched it, I was disappointed that I didn’t know what the Japanese text said, but then I realized that it didn’t matter. Even if that was the first Coke video that I watched and had no foreknowledge of the WWHSN campaign, I’d still love to watch the surprise and happiness on the people’s faces. Coca-Cola shows–without saying anything–that it can bring happiness.

And for an international product, that’s a pretty valuable thing. I can’t think of many other global campaigns that can have such a unified campaign without having to translate the whole idea into other languages. (Though VW’s Fun Theory gets close.)

What do you think? Are there some other good global campaigns out there? Tell me about it below!