ABSTRACT
Home videos of explosive Coke-Mentos soda fountains and Coke-Mentos rockets started appearing on the Web in early 2006. This association of Coke with a lesser known brand of mints took both brands by surprise. The brand companies could control neither the uses made of their products, nor the dissemination of the images of these uses. The replication, video capture and Web-based sharing of Coke-Mentos experiments snowballed. Thousands of experiments were uploaded to the Web and viewed by millions. A very enterprising team of performance artists called EepyBird took the Coke-Mentos phenomenon to new aesthetic heights. One particular experiment, which commentators likened to the spectacular fountains of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, was rapidly powered up by virally-disseminated, viewer-generated recommendations to the top of ‘most watched’ lists on sites such as Revver and YouTube.1 Mentos was very happy with this popular appropriation and display of its brand, and its association with youth culture values. It estimated this media exposure was worth US$10 million, equivalent to more than half its annual advertising budget for the US market (Vranica and Terhune 2006), and took immediate steps to build on this publicity opportunity by partnering with YouTube to run a competition for the best Coke-Mentos video. Although early responses reported from Coke were not enthusiastic, the global soft drink giant also elected to explore this consumer-generated media activity as a brand-building opportunity. It mounted a ‘Poetry in Motion’ competition that challenged Coke consumers to show the world what extraordinary things they could do with everyday objects (Vranica and Terhune 2006).
