Coke Promotes Itself in a New Virtual World

COCA-COLA lovers will have a new place to hang out starting today, and it is an island on the Internet that is shaped like a Coke bottle.

CC Metro, the virtual world beginning today at there.com, where visitors create an avatar to shop for Coca-Cola products.

At CC Metro, the name of the island, visitors can set up a virtual alter ego known as an avatar, which can then shop and dance at the Coca-Cola diner, visit a movie theater to watch short films and soar around on a hoverboard like the one in the 1989 movie, “Back to the Future Part II.”

Coke is introducing its online island within a larger virtual world site called there.com that tries to filter out unsavory content. The company that operates there.com, Makena Technologies, uses software to censor user postings for foul language and employs a team of people to filter out content that might infringe on copyrights or fall outside a PG-13 rating. Makena, of San Mateo, Calif., says that these practices make its site desirable to advertisers.

At CC Metro, Coca-Cola customers can buy clothing and accessories for their avatars using reward points culled from codes on Coke bottle caps, which can also be used at mycokerewards.com. Customers can dress up their avatars as they move them around the island.

“It’s really bringing the offline world, where you’re drinking our products, and the online worlds together,” said Carol Kruse, vice president for global interactive marketing at the Coca-Cola Company.

•

There.com is not as famous as the virtual world Second Life, where companies like Adidas and Dell are advertising and selling products. About 573,000 people visited Second Life in October, while the traffic at there.com was too sparse to be picked up by the Web measurement company Nielsen Online.

Coke was an early mover in the realm of virtual worlds, viewing them as ways to engage their customers and build their brands. Five years ago, it opened a world called Coke Studios on myCoke.com.

Ms. Kruse says that about 112,000 people have visited Coke Studios each month and that the average visitor logged on three times a week for 16 minutes at a time. Coke consistently finds that some of its popular rewards offered from bottle cap points are digital goodies like virtual patio furniture for visitors’ virtual rooms.

A number of consumer brands are designing virtual worlds that may resemble Coke’s new island, said Reuben Steiger, the chief executive of Millions of Us, an advertising agency that focuses on virtual worlds.

“The ones that are going to prosper are going to be the ones that don’t feel like advertising. No one really wants to go hang out in an ad,” Mr. Steiger said.

Several advertisers have approached there.com about purchasing virtual billboards on the site, but the site has turned them down to avoid irritating its users, said Michael Wilson, chief executive for Makena Technologies.

Creating a good use of virtual worlds takes a bit of creativity, he said. People cannot actually taste Coke drinks, after all, if their avatars take a gulp.

When Procter & Gamble wanted to promote its Secret deodorant brand in MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach, Mr. Wilson said his first reaction was “my avatars don’t sweat.” Procter ended up running a promotion on the site where users shared their secrets.

Skeptics of virtual worlds point out that they have far less traffic than social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. And while people who frequent social networks tend to depict themselves truthfully (more or less), people setting up avatars in virtual worlds are probably creating fantasy figures so their actions may be less useful to advertisers.

Mr. Wilson said even fantasy-driven avatars should provide helpful information to advertisers because they reflect their creators’ interests.

“It’s you who decide what your avatar is like,” he said. “That’s part of who you are because you chose to do that.”

•

In addition to building there.com, Makena Technologies has created seven virtual world sites for MTV Networks, a unit of Viacom. MTV hired a market research firm, MauroNewMedia, to study the behavior of half a million avatar users over six months (using only their avatar names, not their real names) and determined that there was value in collecting the data and using it for targeted marketing.

“These platforms like Makena are designed to provide market research on steroids,” said Charles I. Mauro, president of MauroNewMedia. “This level of research allows us to be extremely accurate in a way that was never possible before to pinpoint when avatars are looking at advertisements, looking at products.”

Children are using virtual worlds in larger numbers than the general population, which could bode well for the future popularity of these sites.

Disney’s Club Penguin had nearly 3.9 million unique visitors last month, and Webkinz had nearly 7.3 million. Those sites are advertisement-free; people pay for some of the content, either by subscription (in the case of Club Penguin) or for a stuffed animal with a code to the site (Webkinz).

Ms. Kruse of Coca-Cola said she thought the online universe was likely to include as many varieties of ad placements as the offline world does with television, radio, print and radio.

CC Metro, she said, is supposed to complement Coke’s efforts on Facebook as well as Sprite Yards, the social networking site for cellphones that the company introduced last spring.