Seize The Day: Coke Embraces Viral Video Craze

When interest exploded last summer in homemade online videos showing the geyser effect created when Mentos candy is mixed with Diet Coke, the Coca-Cola Co. ignored it. Taste, not chemistry, was the reason the company said it wanted consumers to drink the soda.

Coke may also have worried that consumers would ask questions about what ingredients in the soda could cause such a reaction.

When the excitement didn't cool--images spilled across YouTube and other sites--Coke, like many companies, got pulled into the user-generated content whirl. Last week, CEO Neville Isdell sounded like Coke saw a marketing opportunity in the viral video craze from the start, as he spoke about it to a group of analysts.

While it "came accidentally," he said, it was "opportunistic." "We have to look at what happens on the Internet ... we could have shoved that aside," he said. "In fact, we haven't. We captured it, and we got immense mileage out of it."

Isdell was referring to a deal Coke made in late October with the creators of one of the most buzzed-about Coke-Mentos instant fountains posted on EepyBird.com. The company joined in a promotion inviting individuals to submit videos of their own. Conversely, Mentos embraced the phenomenon almost from the start.

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In fact, with EepyBird as a backdrop, Isdell was quick to point out that Super Bowl and other high-profile spots were losing some importance at the company--mentioning that 15% of its marketing spend in North America is on digital platforms.

Now, the would-be indie EepyBird site includes the following link-line: "Be sure to visit Coke.com to find out about our "Poetry in Motion" video challenge!"

Isdell's reaction was notable: He plugged the effectiveness of the promotion as an example of the company's most innovative marketing efforts, in sharp contrast to Coke's initial reaction.

"It's an entertaining phenomenon," a Coke representative told The Wall Street Journal in June. "We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try experiments with it." She added that the "craziness with Mentos ... doesn't fit with the brand personality" of Diet Coke, the Journal said. As Isdell praised the "mileage" Coke continues to get from its "Poetry in Motion Challenge," he also extolled the company's "Coke Side of Life" campaign for its flagship brand. The campaign from agency Wieden+Kennedy had two spots on the recent Super Bowl, and will be in more than 200 countries by the end of the year.

"We've got a global hit on our hands," he said. "'The Coke Side of Life' is working ... It's right at the essence of Coca-Cola--about optimism, about fun, about uplift."

He also pushed some 60 million hits on coca-cola.com--a brand-generated content site--in 2006, and its availability in 11 languages.

For its sake, competitor Pepsi is making a major foray into the brand-generated content field this year. It is rotating the designs of the cans for its flagship brand to focus on various passions shared by millennials and other young people. Each design will contain a Web address, such as pepsisports.com or pepsifun.com, attempting to direct consumers to its own entertainment platforms.

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