Promoting a Thirst for Sprite in Teenage Cellphone Users
The Coca-Cola Company is hoping its new mobile site for social networking, Sprite Yard, will become the MySpace of the cellphone world. — But some marketing executives say the plan could instead become the BudTV of the soda world …
Context & Ripple Effects
Sprite Yard extends the small-screen courtship marketers began when they first pushed onto mobile in early 2006 — but where that earlier wave was about placing ads, Coca-Cola is now trying to run the destination itself, building a teen social network around Sprite rather than buying space inside someone else's.
The comparison set in the piece is pointed. MySpace spent spring 2007 consolidating — a confirmed $250-$300 million Photobucket acquisition, a rumored Flektor deal — while clamping down on embeddable widgets and fielding attorneys general requests for sex offender data, the kind of brand-safety friction that gives advertisers reasons to want alternatives. Yet the marketing executives quoted doubt a soda brand can conjure an audience the way a real network does, invoking Anheuser-Busch's BudTV as the cautionary case of a brand-built site nobody visits unprompted.
First-order effects
- Coca-Cola shifts from renting teen attention on existing networks to operating its own mobile community, putting Sprite's brand equity directly behind a content-and-networking play it must sustain itself.
- MySpace gains a live test of its moat: whether a marketer can replicate with one product launch what its network effects took years to accumulate.
Second-order effects
- If Sprite Yard follows BudTV's trajectory of thin traffic, brand budgets flow back to established networks like MySpace — though its ongoing scrutiny from state attorneys general hands marketers a reason to hedge on exactly that spend.
- Rival beverage marketers face pressure to answer with their own mobile communities, risking a round of brand-built sites whose costs are certain but whose audiences are not.
Third-order effects
- The pattern forces every large advertiser into a structural choice between owning a channel — full control, unproven pull — and renting reach inside networks that, as MySpace's gradual limits on embedded music and video players show, can reprice or restrict advertiser access whenever they choose.
The trend: Consumer brands are moving from buying placement inside social networks to launching their own mobile-first communities, a bet on owning the audience rather than renting it.