Earlier this week, two new videos of gamified Coke vending machines have appeared on the Internet. Both of these seem to have taken a hint of inspiration from a similar campaign done by Fantastic Delites, in which a person can walk up to the machine and be tasked with a challenge in order to win some free stuff.
The first gamified Coke vending machine comes from Seoul and challenges onlookers to dance likepop-group 2PM to win free bottles of Coke. The better the dance, the more bottles the player can earn:
Interestingly enough, the vending machine seems to be powered by the Microsoft Kinect to measure each player’s moves (and evidently the average person in that mall is an expert break-dancer as well).The second machine comes from Antwerp, Belgium as a marketing campaign for the new Bond movie, Skyfall. People who walked up to the machine are given the opportunity to win free tickets to see the movie, if they can “unlock the 007 in them”:
While these videos make for really interesting marketing campaigns, I’m not sure I can completely believe it. Random expert break-dancers and Coke Zero enthusiasts who look like handsome actors call into question of whether or not any of these videos actually were done by real people. I highly doubt a Kinect is capable of assessing an expert 1990 to the degree of 6 Coke bottles.
Real or Fake? What do you think? If this catches on in America, I see an opportunity for a vending-machine reality show across malls in the U.S.
