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July 11, 2006
Coke and the Ego Fog
Fresh from pooh-poohing citizen marketers who remixed Diet Coke and Mentos into Vegas-style geysers, Coca-Cola hops into the social media game. Well, sort of. It's more like Mike Tyson getting into the boxing ring with a chainsaw.
It cooked up a contest called "The Coke Show" for people to film video shorts of "the essence of you" and upload them to Coke.com. Coke execs and ad agency execs from Wieden + Kennedy determine the winners of the contest. Supposedly site visitors can rate the videos, but that function doesn't seem to be working.
I would link directly to the "Coke Show" entries page but the ENTIRE Coca-Cola website is built in Flash, and there is no URL to grab. *Sigh* Coke, we love you. That's why so many of us write about you. But you're like a Hollywood starlet whose brilliant star has faded because you still think it's 1976. And website visitors long ago said Flash interfaces suck.
Our fellow marketing bloggers feel the same way about the Ego Fog that's clouding Coke's judgment on this new campaign.
BL Ochman: "Watching big ad agencies trying to master new media is a lot like watching people who are having mid-life crises trying to look hip, cool and young by adopting the toys, tools, and language of youth....It's rather pathetic."
Mack Collier: "This is yet another instance of a big company that's scared to death of letting their customers run with their product in a manner which they didn't intend."
Chris Thilk: "It would be important for Coke -- and all other companies -- to realize the extent to which they are no longer in control of their brand identity. A corporate reputation is no longer defined by the official marketing messages being produced, but by the first page of results of a Google search for that brand name."
Sounds like an intervention, Coke. Snap out of it!
Other blogs that reference Coke and the Ego Fog:
» Guerilla in the Board Room from advergirl
Great post (sent to me by Jeff Blankenburg) called [Read More]
Do you think Coke would have been lauded for this effort if they had done it before the Mentos incident (minus the flash, of course)?
I think the problem is that the spokespeople Coke has chosen to talk about these programs probably aren't the folks who actually put it together. They sound more like suits trying to appease the stockholders.
The actual, physical reaction to the video was roughly the same as Mentos, except maybe a little later. If only they got rid of these spokesmen, and let their more impassioned people do the talking. The reaction of the blogoshpere would have been monumentally different.
P
Although I generally agree with your point of view... and I do agree about flash, I think it is possible that the people at Coke did not sit around a conference room and invoke an "Alexander Haig I am in control" here secret handshake; perhaps they should be given some credit for trying, albeit not a picture perfect result in the eyes of many bloggers. Pathetic? Harsh, very harsh.
I can't believe I'm saying this but I think Coke does deserve a little credit for trying. There seem to be so many hands in the pie in a corporation like that, that I don't understand how they get anything done.
But not being able to link to the page is absolutely ridiculous.
On a related note, I was at a July 4th party where a 15 year old started off his fireworks display with the Mentos/Coke trick. The experience simply reminded me of how cool YouTube is, cause I think that's how I saw one of the videos that was going around.
I think Coke deserves a great deal of credit for trying. But here are a few more questions...
Where did they get the seed videos from? The level of sophistication on all of the video's production seems terribly high for being "user created". It would seem as though it was a friends of W+K effort. Not that there is anything wrong with that but all the videos seem very narrowly focused to be "on-brand" w/ Coke. I think W+K did a phenomenal job w/ what they were given (personally I think the best UC campaign W+K could have embarked on w/ any of their clients would have been the 'Girl in the Moon' campaign...soliciting stories from peoples collective memories of Miller High Life: but I digress)
Another explanation for the embedded flash site is public tracking. The casual blogger can't see what kind of traffic and attention the UC campaign is getting if it is deeply embedded in the Coke website. Maybe there is a way to find out, but I can't find one in Alexa.
However, I think to media watchers, Coke is just caught out w/ bad timing. Clearly this effort was planned MONTHS ago and Mentos hitting just prior is plain old bad luck. But as they say in the cycling world, "a great rider makes their own luck". Meaning that everyone would be singing a different tune about this campaign if KO had moved aggressively and sensibly in harnessing the power of the Diet Coke/Mentos phenomenon.
I think the lesson here, for any large brand, is that it is time to figure our user created content...and that agility will be paramount to a brand's success.
Flash can be made such that there is a unique URL for the current state of the Flash app. For example, the Yahoo Maps Beta does this properly.
