coca cola

Though there's no mention of any kind of legal document to support it, and the information is coming from a third party, it does appear at least that Coca Cola, who's virtual thirst campaign in Second Life asks residents to create a vending experience in the virtual world that captures the "spirit" of the brand, have released their trademark to residents.

My friend Vint Falken reports that she received the following message from SLX, a web based shopping engine for the Second Life: "We have spoken to Coca-Cola and they have released their trademark to SL Merchants. Therefore, any of your items that were disabled on June 7, 2007 have been retrieved….". The email was in follow up to a take down of a "coke suit" Vint had made and put up for sale on the site.

Coca Cola wants you to design a "virtual vending machine" in the 3D world of Second Life. Not just any vending machine though, despite a horrifying tendency for companies to mirror their real world marketing in the virtual, Coke actually want to do something interesting. They want you to design an "experience vendor" if you will. A machine that can dispense items that will enhance the Second Life experience and that residents can share with each other.

Its funny. Whenever I mention my belief that companies need to be thinking about viral, copyable, modifiable objects that residents can pass amongst each other rather than building replicas of their real world buildings and hoping people "just come", many of the folks I talk to in SL seem to vitually shrug their shoulders. It's no surprise that Coke is close to the mark though, they hired Crayon and Millions of us for this gig. Two companies that combine a lot of marketing and technical talent and are well suited to making a campaign like this work.

The winner of the design competition, whether they submit via SL, YouTube or MySpace (i've no idea on that last one..) will get to jet into California and work with the Millions of us team to build out their vision into a virtual reality.

If you're interested in learning more, Gideon from Crayon tells me there will be a press event held on Crayonville Island at 5pm SLT (PDT).

Thanks to Mark Wallace for the original tip.