Metaversed's Nick Wilson has a blog article with a number of useful links reviewing Coke's promo in SL.

Coke and Crayon and allies made a good presentation, quite up front, at SLCC.  I'm reporting their testimony here, as I remember it.  It wasn't quite as self-deprecating as Philip's, but it was bold. 

How honest?  Well, that's always hard to judge.  But I'm willing to give them some benefit of the doubt, since they really are putting more effort in, and taking a pioneering stance.

Coke says they didn't intend to create a permanent presence in SL, and the only thing they regretted about it was not making that clear -- the contest was a finite promo.  It had a beginning, middle, and end.  A charming young woman,  Ann Marie Mathis (SL:Emerie May), won the prize, and is now working with them in San Francisco to roll out the new Coke widget that was the prize winning design.  Perhaps things are taking longer than expected, but that often happens in uncharted and experiemental projects (my comment).

Coke claims they are still quite devoted to SL, consider the promotion to be a success from "Happiness Factory" to the design contest and into the future. 

They are looking forward to rolling out more Coke experiences for folks, and their recent blessing on a resident-made Coke-brand displaying garment (something they didn't mention until I brought it up in the Q&A) seems as though it shows clue, IMO.  (Someone send me a link on this, please, and I'll hat tip you?)

We need to stop expecting companies to create the fully staffed mall to be in-world.
God knows, it's not what we expect from SL-native shops, but they are...native.  We believe that the extra mile expected of outside companies is necessary -- that's accepted wisdom.  We are, perhaps, too generous in our acceptance of wisdom in a young field.  But that accepted wisdom is about consumer (or in our case resident cultural) acceptance of the colonial invasion of F1000s.  It is not about what one needs to do to sell in SL.

Find out for me how many of the fashionista companies advertising in Second Style do quite well without staffing?  It really depends on what the goal is.  And Coke's goal may be to be a pioneer and understand what they must be doing in two years to be doing all this for real.  Good on them.

Some companies should only come in for events, promos, hiring fairs, or to sponsor events for charity and the arts.  It's the cultural equivalent of appropriate technology.

Nick's fond of putting out parallels to the web in 1997.  A convenient year, as it has that "decade" thing going on, but to my mind, 1995 would be more appropriate.  That was the year I started my own interactive agency.

In 1995, before the legal (in the US) and cultural acceptance of encryption made pervasive secure e-commerce possible, the right web site for many companies selling products was....a billboard!  The exact thing that we dis companies for a couple years later, because they didn't adopt online shopping.

However, before secure e-commerce and critical masses of shoppers online, the investment in shopping online didn't pencil out.  In 1995, an "e-commerce" site was a catalog site that built an order form that you then mailed in, and the company called you for a credit card.  It was poorly accepted and cludgy.

We're there now.  Some companies who sell product, as early adopters, are working on promoting and even selling (say, iWoot in SL, or Pizza Hut in EQ2 in 2005.

But we need to get over this hump, or much as we decry the design flaws of 1997 web being reproduced today in virtual worlds, we're going to find ourselves adopting the groupthink of the folks who said no one would ever sell anything but porn on the web.

These Coke project folks are pretty transparent.  They  have plans and aspirations.  Should we be going to them and meeting them halfway on the concept that they also have read Cluetrain?  Some of these folks are bold experimenters, even if some are the victims of build-and-bold developers.  But that's another blog article...