“When I was getting my computer science degree we were always talking about the merging of computers and television, the living room and the office coming together. Then when one of my employees read about Joost and how it was set up by the two Skype guys. We were curious. It seemed like the first time that something could really happen,” recalls Stafford Green, head of interactive marketing for the Coca-Cola European Union Group.

 

Coke had already signed up as one of the 30 founding advertisers, which also included Wrigley, T-Mobile, Maybelline and Philips.

 

Eric Clemenceau, head of advertising sales for EMEA at Joost, says: “Coca-Cola was ready to be one of the first advertisers on the platform, as long as it was able to develop some cool, engaging things.”

 

Green adds: “I was more interested in how to engage the community better and be a net exporter of ideas within the community. So, out of curiosity, we set up a meeting. One of the cool things about working for Coke is that you can get in anywhere.”

 

Joost already had some widgets, according to developer Colm O’Connor, such as a subtitle widget, but so far none had been commercial.

 

Green says: “There are all these different communities such as Facebook and MySpace and you have to think about it as if you are coming to someone’s home for dinner. So you have to be in the conversation and talk about what they are interested in talking about. You have to be honest about who you are, say you work for Coca-Cola, but don’t just start saying, ‘buy Coke, buy Coke, buy Coke’.”

 

So Joost and Coca-Cola had a few brainstorming meetings. The effort was largely collaborative, with Coke’s only caveat being that the widget had to be aligned roughly to the Coke point of view on life – “about connecting people, optimism, glass half full, which is perfect for this”.

 

Clemenceau adds: “With creative advertisers, a creative platform and creative users, you need to find a creative way of communicating. People are not only watching TV, but sharing. It is great for a brand to provide tools to allow people to communicate.”

 

According to Green, the idea of something that allowed people to talk about what they were seeing stuck in his mind. “We talked about live chat at the beginning, but their technology wasn’t quite ready for that,” he says. “Then we talked about avatars so two people could appear on the screen watching TVtogether even if they were in different parts of the world. So a father could be on a business trip, but watch a cartoon together with his daughter.”

 

The collaboration between Coke and Joost didnot involve any agencies. Green explains: “I use agencies all of the time, I can’t live without them. But I also believe that there is a whole body of work that companies do where agencies are not the best approach. We already had the idea – I was going to use the tweaked visual idea that we have within Coke – so why pay somebody to pay somebody to pay somebody?”

 

 

Having decided on the widget concept, Joost and Coke put the challenge out to developers. Small prizes were offered for the best ideas. “It was sort of an open-source approach to doing stuff, not just sitting in a room telling the community what we think they want the developers to do,” says Green.

 

Clemenceau says that from the start the project was open to as many people as possible to participate in and engage with. “This was the missing piece of the puzzle – about working out the relationship between the users and the brand, the users and the platform and the users and each other,” he says. “The beauty of this platform is that you can bring in all the creativity.”

 

O’Connor chose a team of three people who took around three to four months to develop the widget. The team was given a lot of support by Joost.

 

From the developer side, the key challenge, says O’Connor, was “building against the new system. You had to delve down to a deep level with technical issues, not just building new features around TV.”

 

He adds: “As soon as you have some passionate people ready to invest time, ideas and money then you’ve already got something. But to build something really innovative you need to be able to dedicate time, and with a new platform like Joost there was so much to build.”

 

On the client side, the challenge was security. Green says: “You don’t want someone to eavesdrop on that business, so we needed to ensure that it was all encrypted and hosted on a site in Cincinnati that had all these security walls. The technology was so new and the software developers’ kit was not used before, so we were right on the cutting edge of stuff.”

 

Green says there were no metrics for success because he didn’t want to limit the team. “The project was already successful in my mind because my team had now done the first interactive widget ever on Joost and maybe on interactive TV,” he says.

 

Clemenceau says that, although figures regarding the number of downloads of the widget can’t be revealed, the project has been a success. “We have had other advertisers asking, ‘Why did you do this with Coke and not us?’. When you have other advertisers on your back you know it was successful.”

 

Green concludes: “I hope if others do it, they do it correctly. With Coke Bubbles, there was a bit of branding when you opened it, but when you are in the conversation there is nothing. That’s the right way to do it. I just hope that other advertisers have the discipline not to be rude at the table and do things that are cool and fun.”