The Coke Machine Network
Posted in Latest, Thoughts - January 16, 2010 - tim
I travel to the South a couple of times a year and since there seem to be far more McDonald’s than Starbucks out in the wilds of Tennessee and Mississippi I have often pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot for their $2.95 / 2 hours Wifi deal – to reconnect to civilization.
Now, McDonald’s is opening up their network – and rapidly – as a free service.
Which is great, and reminded me of the following:
Back in the late nineties I got to know Jeff Dunn, then President of Coca-Cola NA when we were pitching them. We had a couple of discussions about the interactive landscape and at one point he asked me a really great question.
“How many Coca-Cola machines do you think there are in North America?”
“No idea,” I said. (It’s still a hard number to pin down and I still don’t have a good answer.)
“I’m not going to tell you,” Jeff said, “but here’s my question: what would you do with them?”.
And he basically escorted me out with that.
I mulled this over a while. Asked a few other people. No brilliant ideas. So I came up with a simple list of “facts”:
1. There are a lot.
2. They have a “density” that is probably proportionate to population.
3. They are located in a lot of interesting places – including businesses, schools, colleges, public spaces, gas stations.
4. They function as both a vending mechanism, and a branding / advertising mechanism.
5. They occupy physical space – about a meter square footprint, and in many cases the airspace above.
6. They are powered.
About two weeks after I met with Jeff I wrote him a letter with my answer:
Create the Coke Network.
Basically, the idea was this: use the physical container of the basic Coke machine (either retrofit existing machines or proactively fit new machines) to include a Wifi hotspot. For some machines you’d have to hardwire to the net. For others – given the density of Coke machines especially in urban areas – they might be able to wirelessly connect and extend each other.
I still don’t have any idea how many Coke machines there are in North America, or what technical limitations you’d hit to implement something like this, but from a marketing / branding perspective it’s a very tantalizing concept for me. And similar to what Starbucks and McDonald’s have done – but potentially much, much more interesting.
Imagine traveling and sniffing for hotspots on the go. Odds are you would pick up a Coke machine – or a dozen – damn near everywhere. The sign in page would be one big Coke ad / brand impression, and the deals you could cook up (like the Starbucks card) would be endless. Buy a Coke, get 15 minutes of Wifi. Or, to take it way out there, buy a Coke from your web interface and it pops out of the machine. Or, to go crazy / social / wacky, buy a Coke on a random machine and have it pop out (what was the old campaign? “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.”)
A pipe-dream obviously. But this is the kind of technology-meets-branding/advertising that really turns me on. Not more bullshit product placement, or Flash campaigns, or any other old media translated to online nonsense.
Lots of corporations – especially consumer goods – should consider how they could create a “platform” of sorts. But most don’t have a clue, or it’s just too much of a stretch for the product or category. But Coke and the Coke Network? Coke actually has this amazing physical “footprint” that makes even pervasive retailers (like Starbucks) look sparse. If they did something like that I for one would be damned seriously impressed.
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