Friday, April 20, 2007

Coke Gets a Second Life

Ah nothing like a creative post title to start the weekend off with a bang! Coke has launched its first foray into online world Second Life with its Virtual Thirst promotion. The initiative, designed by Crayon, lets SL users create a 'vending' machine that vends an 'experience' rather than cans. You can submit your idea in the SL community, or in written form, as images or videos.

Jaffe explains how Crayon and Coke worked together to create the promotion: "We worked closely with them to take a ground-up approach by extensively collaborating with the SL community – as advisors, developers, project managers, journalists and judges."

Karl had a great point that Coke doesn't make the same mistake with this promotion as it did with the disastrous 'The Coke Show', in that here, the initiative takes place in Second Life, ie where the community is. And I also agree with him that I'm not sure if this passes anyone's 'who gives a damn' test, then again I'm not in Second Life, and I do think it's smart that they are holding the promotion there, and letting SL users judge the winners.

It sure as hell beats holding a Coke-Mentos copycat geyser-video contest on a Coke site and wondering why no one shows up.



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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Mack,

Kill me if I understand the whole SL marketing projects. They all look pretty much lame to me.

The SL community has more than once said that they really want brands to stay out and not interfere the fun.

These emerging platforms and environments are places to learn NOT space to invade!

I very much agree with Eric:
http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/archive/2007/04/02/2964.html

good weekend

A.

csven said...

I believe what they're doing is poorly conceived and executed. I won't drone on with details, but here are some relevant posts:

http://blog.rebang.com/?p=1250
http://blog.rebang.com/?p=1251
http://blog.rebang.com/?p=1253

The last one includes details from the Staples competition currently running. Compare Coca-cola's competition with Staples' and tell me which you'd bother to enter. It's no contest, imo.