You can win but you can't hide

You can win but you can't hide: The story of Coca-Cola's Unexpected Summer.

In early May of 2004, people across the United States were doing many things: wrapping up the school year, preparing for summer trips, and relaxing lending standards for residential mortgages. Steven Schiller, a marketing executive at Coca Cola, wasn't doing any of that. He was preparing to launch Coca Cola's latest marketing stunt, a national campaign designed to reverse the gradual decline in Coke Classic sales.

Red Coke can with speaker grille and buttons for calling, answering, and hanging up As with most of Coca-Cola's projects, it involved a bright red cylinder. Unlike most of Coca-Cola's red cylinders, however, this one didn't contain the usual blend of corn syrup and trace additives. The buttons, speaker grille, and satellite icon hint at the contents: a cell phone and GPS tracker. The concept was simple to describe but presumably hard to implement: out of the millions of cans of coke delivered that summer, 120 would be these phones-in-a-can. The lucky winners would press the button on the side. The phone would connect them to the prize center. They would be congratulated, and ordered to carry the can at all times. At some point during the next 3 weeks, a Coke red team would use the tracking function to find the winner anywhere in the world (with good cell coverage) and descend upon them to deliver one of the major prizes, such as a mid-range SUV, home entertainment system, or a million dollars.

The launch commercial shows potential winners what to expect during what Coca-Cola called the "Unexpected Summer":

The campaign centered on the then-futuristic GPS tracker, which allowed Coke's prize teams to locate the winners. To add a bit more flair to their lives, Coke also posted the winners' locations on the Unexpected Summer website. It was implemented in Flash, so not much remains. However, there is enough left to know that it was a very good website, with sound, which you'll want to hear, probably more than once: The tracking aspect even caused a minor panic in the armed services: not content to fear the Furby, they diversified into fearing the Unexpected Summer. As CBS reported at the time, Master Sgt. Jerry Meredith of Fort Knox said "We're asking people to open the cans and not bring it in if there's a GPS in it." Pretending to feel anything but glee at the coverage, a Coca-Cola spokesman pointed out that the buttons, labels, and total absence of soda make the winning cans fairly easy to spot.

In addition to the grand prizes delivered via tracking-device Coke can, the promotion feature numerous smaller prizes awarded from radio station events or peel-off labels on special cans. One of those was this little oddity, sporting basic PDA functions and a camera, all in a wrist-sized package!

Naturally, I had to have it. At the cost of $32.60 (including tax + shipping) and 5 days of waiting I did: Chunky gray wristwatch with monochrome screen and black straps

Chunky gray wristwatch with monochrome screen and black straps

The packaging includes a helpful summary of the main features, plus a detailed spec sheet for the technically-minded.

The specs promise 300 days of standby or 5 minutes in camera mode, putting the watch roughly 7000 days since a battery change. The battery shelf life was unspecified, and must be incredible: it started up immediately, despite having languished for the better part of 20 years. Quick to navigate it was not, and two pixel rows on the screen had died, but it worked! As the packaging promised, it offers a complete calendar (including recurring events), contacts, todo list, memos (not fun typing with only left/right/enter), and the obligatory snake game. The headline feature is, of course, the camera. It has a near-realtime preview, though it only runs at 2 frames per second. That, plus the monochrome screen, makes framing shots more guesswork than art. Once taken, photos can be viewed or password protected. You know, for any postage-stamp sized sensitive photos one might take.

Delightful as the watch itself is, it only allows viewing the photos in 1-bit black and white. More fun is transmitting them to other watches via the included link cable, or sending them to a computer using the provided RS-232 cable. Desktop software came on the included CD. The packaging claims it supports Windows 95, but Windows' backwards compatibility being what it is, Windows 10 works just fine: It's impossible to overstate the charmingly half-baked '90s energy of this masterpiece (preserved at the Internet Archive; here is a sample data file with photos). The synchronization feature is eminently polished: you get clear instructions, an accurate progress bar, robust retry, and error handling. But the main window isn't draggable: after launch, the program lays claim to an arbitrary place on the screen and establishes itself therein. Dragging doesn't work; the window stays there until closed.

The interface is the pinnacle of skeuomorphic excellence, replete with gradients, 3d effects, and a non-round window that would have been enormously difficult to accomplish at the time. But the "Print" button doesn't use the Windows print dialog; it just picks one of your printers and fires off the image. No user feedback of any sort; just a random connected printer starting up. There is probably some metaphor here about the variability of modern software or society writ large, but it seems just as likely that Keysbond Ltd did the best they could given budgetary and time constraints.

The best feature is easily photo export, which provides a fun bonus: rudimentary support for filters! In addition to the original in minimal-def 160x160 resolution, the software produces variants with the white balance corrected and a charmingly retro "Kodak" style applied. They look...well, they look about as expected given the 0.0256 megapixel resolution:

	Original	Sharpen	White Balance	Kodak
My garage
A better framed photo of my garage
Half of my monitor
The rest of my monitor, editing this very page. Recursion!
Me!

The "sharpen" filter is either pretend, or perhaps is also applied to the filterless-exported images, because the sharpened and unsharpened variants look the same.

What makes this magic happen? It's easy enough to find out, since the watch is neither glued nor ultrasonically welded. A series of small screws hold the case together. Removing them allows free exploration of the internals.

Circuit board with coin cell holder and various surface mount components — First up is the IO board, with the battery clip and various passives for IO/power/support.

Circuit board with two epoxy blobs and many traces and vias — The IO board's connected to the processor board, which disappointingly (but perhaps understandably, given size and cost considerations) just has two mystery blobs.

Stackup of two circuit boards connected by two flat ribbon cables — The processor board connects to the screen via two flat ribbon cables. They are glued on, and it seems unlikely the package was kept in a temperature controlled environment since the 2000s. Presumably, they are partially detached and causing the dead pixels.

Closeup of monochrome screen — Finally, the screen itself. Note the small metal triangle at the bottom: it's the center button. As a cost saving measure, the designers used a flexed piece of metal soldered directly to the board instead of a button. It still provides a reasonable clicky feel.

The watch rested patiently for almost 20 years, an eternity for a bit of throwaway consumer kit. Even the tough, hand-slicing PET of the clamshell packaging couldn't entirely insulate it from the passage of time. Though the watch worked initially, from the moment I powered it on a few rows and columns were blank. As I wandered through the menus and snapped some photos, more and more areas of the screen blanked out until it was entirely gone. And with that, this odd little relic of an ad campaign no one remembers settled back into oblivion.