Weekly Buzz Viral campaigns & branded content

Coke Mentos – Aren’t We Done With This?

If you spend a considerable amount of time on the internet you will at some point have come across the famous “Mentos in Coke” experiment. In short you have to get as many Mentos as possible into a bottle of Coke, and then await the big fountain of Coke shooting up in the air. It’s a spectacular sight – in fact so spectacular that David Letterman had an entire symphony of Coke/Mentos in his Late Night Show.

It didn’t take long before YouTube was swarming with various clips of people trying out the impressive – almost chemistry-like experiment. The Discovery Channel program “MythBusters” featured the experiment in one episode, and revealed the secret behind the chemical reaction. Finally Carlsberg made a spoof on the experiment in a viral advert – that actually turned out to be quite entertaining!

Now it’s Coca Cola Zero’s turn:

The problem with this otherwise nicely produced advert is that it is tardy. The Letterman segment dates back to 2006 – 4 years ago! Isn’t time to come up with something new and original instead of using a somewhat outdated trick? If using this trick in an advert should work, perhaps a little exaggeration would be nice? Perhaps they should have gone to the moon instead – or even something more crazy, wild, well just more original?