Can Coca-Cola Compete with Traditional Media Publications?

About a year ago, I was having lunch with an old colleague in the digital advertising industry who asked me where I thought the Internet was headed. Now, I am not a visionary or web guru of any sort. However, knowing that I had to pivot my business in the past year towards content marketing (because that’s what everyone was requesting from me), I told him that I thought that big brands would start to create their own web-based publications that might soon rival those of traditional media publications online. He, being a digital advertising salesman, was somewhat skeptical.

I recently wrote a blog post commenting on Coke’s big plan for digital storytelling which revealed details on how the company would develop creative content for the web. Well, according the NYTimes.com, the company is re-designing it’s website to reflect something “more akin to a consumer magazine than a business portal.”

So, I guess my prediction, if Coke is successful, is on its way to becoming a reality. It’s not a big surprise. As I mentioned in this post from July 2011, social media has basically become the soap opera of the digital age. As such, brands are developing web-based media publications and channels where their stories can be shared and commented on to spread virally online. Whether all of them will succeed in this pursuit is not yet clear. However, I think we’ll see a lot of other companies following Coke’s lead in the near future.

Do you agree? Please share your thoughts below.