Coca-Cola Europe is using its Fanta brand to tie social media efforts to mobile via a gaming application.

The Fanta King of the Park app lets European consumers play a mobile version of the brand?s popular King of the Park Facebook game. The campaign is aimed at tech-savvy males aged 18 ? 30.

?Social contact and gaming is big for teens, therefore Fanta launched the King of the Park game on Facebook, which ran very successfully for 10 weeks,? said Zoe Howorth, market activation director for Coca-Cola Europe, London.

?Following on from this and understanding the importance of mobile, we wanted to test the game on mobile,? she said.

Mobile soda
The Fanta King of the Park is available for free download in the Britain Apple?s App Store.

Once users open the game, the page is splashed with the Fanta logo, which then moves to the upper left-hand corner.

To play the game, players create a rollercoaster that they have to steer a car down.

The cars are Fanta cans of soda and Fanta products are also placed around the track to include branding throughout the course.

As users make their way around the course, they can collect prizes, which appear as Fanta bottles.

Here is a picture of how users play the game

To tie back in with the game?s original social media premise, users can share their score with friends and family via Facebook.

Before launching the app, King of the Park was a stand-alone Facebook game that users could win tickets to an amusement park to via Web and on-package labels.

Slurp games
Fanta is not the only company using a beverage to promote a product.

Most recently, Pepsi?s Brisk brand rolled out a marketing initiative that used a mobile game as the centerpiece of a multichannel campaign (see story).

A mobile game is also a good way for a brand to keep users coming back to a mobile initiative and bolster user engagement inside of a campaign.

Additionally, the Fanta game is smart to build off of a social game where users are most likely already familiar with the game.

The app also features a button where users can ?like? Fanta on Facebook, which helps boost the beverage company?s social media efforts.

By letting users keep earn points and view a scoreboard, it gives users an incentive to keep playing the game.

As proof of social?s migration to mobile, a recent report from Flurry Analytics found that an increase in Facebook app usage is tied to consumers interacting more with mobile apps.

?Mobile is key to teens ? it is part of their lives and a way we can interact with them,? Ms. Howorth said.

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York