Adobe MAX 2025 Sponsor Activations: Coca-Cola & Sharpie
Adobe partnered with Coca-Cola and Sharpie for MAX 2025, and needed activations where each partner brand could coexist distinctly alongside Adobe's own identity, giving attendees a hands-on, shareable creative experience, all within a 12-week concept-to-live production window.
I directed two parallel booth experiences with agency GPJ. For Sharpie, I commissioned illustrator Alice Bowsher to create five original characters and a two-sided mural spanning both booth walls and the floor.
The interactive centerpiece was "MAXimize This Mini": attendees colored in one of Alice's outline characters with Sharpie, and Firefly's Text to Vector feature turned the filled-in drawing into a finished vector character, which we then harmonized into a scene in Photoshop and brought to life as a short animated video using Veo 3, handing attendees back a personalized, animated version of what they'd just colored by hand. For Coca-Cola: an on-site can-customization station. I unified both under Adobe's "Made by / Created with" attribution system, produced by a cross-functional team of 20+ people spanning 8 functional groups.
The Coca-Cola activation drew 995 attendees, with an average 30–45 minute wait and roughly 12 minutes of engaged experience time. The Sharpie activation drew 1,456 attendees and generated 15M+ social media impressions across more than 1,070 unique accounts.
Credits
John Caponi / Senior Creative Director / Booth creative direction for both activations, Coca-Cola can personalization design templates, Sharpie artist commissioning
GPJ / Agency / Booth production
Alice Bowsher / Illustrator / Sharpie characters and mural
Logan Seamons / Adobe Content Strategist / Sharpie Activation Development
Jacob Levitt / Adobe Marketing Specialist / Coke Activation Development
Peter Chase / Writer and Editor
Elliott Wiener / Adobe Global Content Strategy
Shannon Judkins / Adobe Program Management
