The Coke Fest saga continues
You probably remember the roars of outrage a few weeks back when Coca-Cola in conjunction with 5FM announced the line-up for this year's Coke Fest music festival. Well, the story has just taken another unexpected turn.
The My Coke Fest blog - where people were most vociferous about the craptacular band line-up - is shutting down on 16 February. It turns out the blog was NOT, and was NEVER, the official festival website (That can be found here). Coke got wind of it, its lawyers went into attack mode and blogger Jason has had to tug the site down.
I first heard of this development over at Tech Leader. I commented after the blog entry there, and what follows below is an adapted version of what I had to say.
Out of interest, Coke has responded with their version of events, which can be read here at MarkLives.com. What is perhaps most important about this article is that apparently Coke had been putting legal pressure on Jason since December last year, and not suddenly over the past fortnight or so.
Anyway, my thoughts on the matter:
Honestly, I believe both parties are at fault here. I always believed that My Coke Fest was an official blog (it's been online for 2 years now), as there is nothing to indicate that it's a fan creation.
So, yes, Jason should really have made it clear upfront that his blog was unofficial. That way people would not have been misled into believing their comments and poll votes were impacting on Coke and 5FM’s decision making. I think this played a large role in the massive vocal disappointment when the lousy Zero Fest line-up was announced - site visitors had been led to believe they were making a genuine contribution to the decision making process (e.g. suggesting bands they would like to see)… when in actual fact they weren’t at all.
Plus, by masquerading as an official site, Jason seems to have made some decent advertising revenue, which of course is a big no-no because he's benefiting financially from Coca-Cola trademarks.
This aside, I have little doubt that My Coke Fest was fulfilling an information need and providing a public forum that Coke itself was not. Coke has an official website for the music festival but its one of those soulless corporate creations that tries to substitute substance and personality with Flash graphics that take forever to load. *yawn*. You don't get a sense that there are real, breathing human beings either running the site, or engaging with it, which is what Net users want these days.
The official site also has no talk-back feature apart from links to Facebook and assorted other social media - which I suppose you could say serve the same purpose, although I'm sure many Facebookers would agree that Facebook groups tend to be pointless, deserted pockets of web space where hardly anyone comments.
So, yes, Coke should have created a functional, non-flashy news blog like My Coke Fest…
Although the 2008 start of legal action throws this theory somewhat, I have little doubt that Coke Fest organisers did know about the blog and were referring to it to gauge public opinion. After all, it would have been a nice, free feedback tool for them. They only really developed a problem with it when that feedback turned so negative.
So ultimately, if I was the Coke Zero Fest organisers, I would be very worried right now about the event ending in disaster. There is an amazing amount of bad feeling out there at the moment, and it runs the risk of souring everything. I don't believe it would be a bad idea to pull a "Virgin Fest" and postpone/cancel things until something better (and more satisfying for rock music fans) could be organised.
The My Coke Fest blog - where people were most vociferous about the craptacular band line-up - is shutting down on 16 February. It turns out the blog was NOT, and was NEVER, the official festival website (That can be found here). Coke got wind of it, its lawyers went into attack mode and blogger Jason has had to tug the site down.
I first heard of this development over at Tech Leader. I commented after the blog entry there, and what follows below is an adapted version of what I had to say.
Out of interest, Coke has responded with their version of events, which can be read here at MarkLives.com. What is perhaps most important about this article is that apparently Coke had been putting legal pressure on Jason since December last year, and not suddenly over the past fortnight or so.
Anyway, my thoughts on the matter:
Honestly, I believe both parties are at fault here. I always believed that My Coke Fest was an official blog (it's been online for 2 years now), as there is nothing to indicate that it's a fan creation.
So, yes, Jason should really have made it clear upfront that his blog was unofficial. That way people would not have been misled into believing their comments and poll votes were impacting on Coke and 5FM’s decision making. I think this played a large role in the massive vocal disappointment when the lousy Zero Fest line-up was announced - site visitors had been led to believe they were making a genuine contribution to the decision making process (e.g. suggesting bands they would like to see)… when in actual fact they weren’t at all.
Plus, by masquerading as an official site, Jason seems to have made some decent advertising revenue, which of course is a big no-no because he's benefiting financially from Coca-Cola trademarks.
This aside, I have little doubt that My Coke Fest was fulfilling an information need and providing a public forum that Coke itself was not. Coke has an official website for the music festival but its one of those soulless corporate creations that tries to substitute substance and personality with Flash graphics that take forever to load. *yawn*. You don't get a sense that there are real, breathing human beings either running the site, or engaging with it, which is what Net users want these days.
The official site also has no talk-back feature apart from links to Facebook and assorted other social media - which I suppose you could say serve the same purpose, although I'm sure many Facebookers would agree that Facebook groups tend to be pointless, deserted pockets of web space where hardly anyone comments.
So, yes, Coke should have created a functional, non-flashy news blog like My Coke Fest…
Although the 2008 start of legal action throws this theory somewhat, I have little doubt that Coke Fest organisers did know about the blog and were referring to it to gauge public opinion. After all, it would have been a nice, free feedback tool for them. They only really developed a problem with it when that feedback turned so negative.
So ultimately, if I was the Coke Zero Fest organisers, I would be very worried right now about the event ending in disaster. There is an amazing amount of bad feeling out there at the moment, and it runs the risk of souring everything. I don't believe it would be a bad idea to pull a "Virgin Fest" and postpone/cancel things until something better (and more satisfying for rock music fans) could be organised.
Comments
Reading the write up on how Coke sent him letters asking him to stop and considering he never sought permission in the first place to use the products, I agree with Coke's decision and considering the bad publicity the site has caused I'd probably seek damages myself.
I have had emails from corporations before to do with copyrighted content on websites, stuff I didn't even know was copyrighted. I remove it immediately. He on the other hand kept it up, waited as long as possible to respond to letters and then just ignored them. If he doesn't get sued, he is very lucky.