Sprite up your life

The green, green music grassroots of home

Coca-Cola is embarking on an innovative new interactive YouTube webisode reality series to promote its Sprite soft drink brand. The ‘Green Eyed World: Reality Remixed’ series offers up a window into the life and times, and up and downs of a number of musicians on the road to stardom. The first artist to benefit from this new format is 23-year old singer Katie Vogel from London. Visitors will be able to follow her as she follows her dream plus vote, comment and shape her story along the way. The promotion will run as five seasons of four episodes (of around 5 mins long) with a grand finale in December 2009.

“There is so much great music that is out there – amazing, beautiful artists who don’t get heard because of all the madness that is happening with record labels and publishers,” states Stafford Green, Coca-Cola’s head of digital marketing in Europe.

The brand seeks to be forefront of mind with consumers by taking a back seat and seeding itself gently as a provider of original emerging content. The project is clearly “powered by Sprite” – as stated at the end of each video (to the sound of a Sprite can opening) – but is ultimately centred on the artist above the brand itself.

On-pack promotions will run on Sprite cans in selected European countries, the YouTube site will run in five languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian and German), with potential television broadcasts & related TV commercials also rolling out. Katie Vogel also sports a Sprite-green-coloured Gibson guitar, naturally.

So what?: Sprite is Coke’s emerging markets brand and the fit with emerging artists therefore seem a natural one, with Katie Vogel set to benefit greatly from Sprite’s patronage.

Increasingly emerging artists – which suffer from a lack of any real backstory – need to harness a narrative that they can interweave music around. The issue here for brands is that the artist not only needs to sound good, they also need to be engaging presenters capable of holding an audience’s attention. When a reality TV programme, which this is in micro from, doesn’t have an obvious shock value USP to engage the audience you really have to harness likable down to earth artists that visitors can emphasis with. Katie Vogel appears to fit this bill well and the unique interactivity element could prove to be the most beneficial for the brand. Portals such as this often struggle as destination sites, however the integrated use of Facebook and YouTube together – which is apparently a first for this “hybrid technology” from the two social networks – should help seed the campaign where it matters most.

The only slight problem the campaign may face is the confusion over the artists name, as Katie Vogel is remarkable similar sounding to the established US actress/singer Kate Voegele.

“Very slick production on this web-soap series from Sprite, feels a bit like MTV ‘My Sweet 16’ so should resonate with this younger audience. The ‘buzzword bingo’ script and slightly staged feel of the story need to develop more, but subtle brand presence and a fun show result in a good start for Sprite”
Jack Horner, Creative Director, FRUKT

http://www.youtube.com/greeneyedworld

http://www.myspace.com/thatvogel