Coca-Cola - Personal Road

Back in 2011 Coca-Cola launched the incredible 'Share A Coke' campaign in Australia.  The campaign saw Coca-Cola print 150 of the country’s most popular names on labels of Coke bottles for the first time in the brand’s history.  The idea was to give people a reason to connect with friends through a Coke and by every measure was a huge success.  Since then Coca-Cola has been rolling out the campaign across the world, recently launching Israel where Coke & Gefen Team took the idea of personalization a step further.  They transformed the a series of prominent billboards into interactive displays.  Consumers were asked to download the Coca-Cola smartphone app and enter their name.  The app would then transmit and display their name on the billboard whenever they were in range (using geo-fence technology).  The app would then notify the user when their name was being displayed.

I would normally write this off as a gimmick with too many barriers to entry to get traction amongst users, but one shouldn't underestimate the narcissistic nature of today's smartphone user and their desire to see their name up in lights.  The app ranked #1 in Israel's app store and was downloaded over 100k times.  It's a cool idea and a wonderful execution, but also somewhat creepy.  Is this the first step on the road to the dystopian personalized advertising as imagined in Minority Report?  Check out the case study video below.



Posted by: Reuben Halper

The Beat - Instagram Meets Google Street View

The Beat is an experiment from the social media information lab at Rutgers University.  It blends together geotagged Instagram posts with Google Streetview imagery from that location.  The aim is to give users insight into the life of an area by exploring topics in a new way.  It's preloaded with a #Christmas Instagram hashtag so try putting in your own hashtag either geography such as #London or more interestingly exploring other topics via hashtag such as #Movember

It's a really cool way to give context to Instagram photos by seeing what's around them using Google Streetview.  It'd be interesting to see this also integrated into the This Is Now Instagram project that showed a few weeks ago.

Check it out below or have a play around yourself at The Beat
via PSFK