• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, June 4, 2013

Kudos to Coca-Cola, which has continued to execute with unflagging creativity the Ahhh project started a month and a half ago. This project, aimed mainly at mobile users, promised to create over 60 distinct URLs that extended the Ahhh.com by another "h" with each iteration to launch a Web app experience that include guessing games, tiny arcade challenges, little interactive tchotchkes like modifying the tempo of high-kicking Coke cans, or spinning the bottle (your smartphone) to go back into Coke history.

At their best, the games have the feel of the Nintendo Warioware series. You get brief instructions that you are supposed to glean quickly before the strange assault of oddness begins. What makes the games work is that they are all imaginative -- even when that branded bottle is glaring you in the face.

We often like to say that the best branded entertainment is the stuff where the brand gets out of the way and is not heavy-handed. Perhaps we should modify that and say that the best branded entertainment occurs when the level of entertainment or creativity is high enough that we just don’t care whether the sponsor is in our face. It is still fun.

It is hard to imagine a better content marketing project on mobile than this one. The brand is creating in digital form a promise it started making in 1929 – a “pause that refreshes.” The Web app not only found its way onto my phone home page, but it gets opened about once a week or so just to check in on the imaginative forms it has taken now. It was imagined from the beginning as a mobile-first project that could fill the tiniest of moments but also expand to suck an hour right out of you as you ratchet through the many available options.

Another lesson this project teaches is the importance of variety and the content refresh. Even the best of branded games usually are singular experiences -- one game concept done well, poorly, thinly or deeply. The lightsomeness of these games and their relentless variety keep the idea fresh long after one tires of playing tic-tac-toe with corporate logos. Probably the breakaway hit of the series is a game in which you have to guess whether an extreme close-up image is “cat or not” as it zooms out into view. Ahhh becomes Awww.