Remember how, back in April, I wrote about Coke's launch event, and we've also reported on how Coke is leaving according to Business Week? We must have reported on this Wired article too, but I can't find it.

Tateru wrote a short piece about Mike Donnelly's talk at SLCC as blogged by ESC's Joel Greenburg (remember ESC didn't do the work on this one, Crayon did) in which Donnelly states, as far as we can tell from the quotes given he regards the campaign as:

1. Not over
2. Already a success

But, the naysayers are out already... Tony Walsh on his blog is unimpressed by Coke's claim of a success, and has some numbers he regards as less impressive to back his ideas up.
Who do you trust here? Greenburg doesn't have a direct interest - he's not getting more business out of Coke, because he's not getting any at the moment and you'd have thought Coke would probably stay with Crayon if they really like what's going on. Donnelly doesn't need to say the campaign is a success if it's not - although no-one's mentioned an exact amount less than US$0.5M (as quoted from the talk) on an experimental campaign that fails isn't going to get him fired and Coke could just pull out. A little comment from reading both articles back-to-back had me thinking. Walsh criticises the campaign on the metrics he chooses "because activity around these Virtual Thirst web destinations has barely increased since I last checked back in early June" but Donnelly says "We rented space on Crayon Island for the duration of the campaign. There's no reason to build an island without a long term plan" and the analysis is about an event based campaign: "Like the real world, there are a variety of events marketers can sponsor in Second Life; they do not need to build a sim. It all depends on the marketing problem you need to solve and the strategies for solving it."

So, shortly after an event there's a rush of signing up to the various aspects of it, which then tails off - but I'm sure Coke will hope with their launch of the competition winner event there will be another rush of new material and interest. With this being their strategy, why is seeing this pattern of engagement indicative of failure? Or is there an axe to grind on one part?

One interesting thing that came out of SLCC was the revelation that it appears that Wired was not only trash-talking Second Life, but that the trash-talk was the goal and intent, quite independent of the realities.

Coca Cola's Mike Donnelly, Director of Global Interactive Marketing says that Wired's Frank Rose completely misrepresented his and Coca Cola's position on Second Life. It's a public dustup about lies and distortion in the media. Yummy.

Enjoy the show...