Assessing Coke’s Virtual Thirst Project: Win, Fail, or Just Another SL Dud?
Writing by Green Guy on Thursday, 22 of November , 2007 at 6:32 am
Broken Crayons: Was The Virtual Thirst Contest The Last Gasp of the Crayonistas?
by Urizenus Sklar
I don’t know, I’m asking. I missed the event announcing the winner of the Coke Virtual Thirst Contest, and I don’t know how that event went down. As I disclosed earlier I was on an advisory panel for Coke and the Crayonista marketing company where my advice — 1 million L in prize money and that they protect the IP rights of the winner — did not have uptake. I was also one of the contest judges. I’m guessing there were 80 to 100 entries and a lot of them were impressive and showed considerable effort. I don’t know what participation levels they were looking for but they generated a nontrivial number of entries at least. Here is the eventual winner:
>>>>
This seemed like a particularly important hypervent for SL because it involved a very serious new media marketing company working for a big time advertiser in Coke, and I felt they were making a genuine effort to figure out how to approach SL in a way that avoided the usual fare of ghost islands and empty monolithic buildings. How should we assess this effort: win? fail? learning and E for effort?
Meanwhile, for those of you who missed it, Crayon has relauched as a “conversational marketing company”, or as one less charitable blogger put it: “gone out of business“. Whatever you want to call it, Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson, Steve Coulson, Gary Cohen, and C.C. (”I’m done coloring“ 
Chapman have all left Crayon. Whatever the future of Crayon in SL (if any), it seems like Joseph Jaffe hasn’t given up on SL, claiming that the problem with marketing efforts in SL is not the medium of SL per se, but rather with the creativity of the marketing types. Well, maybe.
As for me, I had a bad nostalgia attack for the days when we dumped on them for their launch and then the Herald and the Crayonistas got to talk smack to each other and let’s not forget the Cardie Mahoney scandal. In the end of course we became good buds, and I wish them all well. They definitely gave us something to write about.
In Memory…
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