NEW YORK--Coca Cola today launched a social networking mobile portal built around its Sprite soft drink line targeted squarely at the popular beverage’s largest customer base, teens. The first-of-its-kind mobile marketing initiative is designed, Coke officials said, to reach out to what is traditionally one the hardest to reach demographics and build a long-lasting relationship with that core market.

While the downloadable portal, called The Sprite Yard, is highlighted in characteristic Sprite green and carries the Sprite logo, it does surprisingly little else to promote the soft drink brand otherwise. Instead it offers several social applications, such as an IM/e-mail feature, group message boards, photo sharing and a calendar function that can be coordinated with other friends’ calendars—all available free to anyone who joins the network. In addition, Sprite is giving out free visual ringtone and mobisodes content linked to PIN codes found under Sprite bottle caps, as a way to tie the portal back to soft drink sales. Speaking at the Mobile Marketing Forum event in New York, Coca Cola senior vice president of marketing communications and insights Mark Greatrex said that Sprite’s youthful customer base matches very closely to the mobile lifestyle. Teens are using mobile data services more than any other consumer group, making Sprite a perfect candidate for a mobile marketing campaign of this magnitude, he said.

“To strengthen our brand relevance for this generation, we should empower them,” Greatrex said. A social portal, which Coke hopes customers will use with daily, will move Sprite from a brand which merely pushes out its marketing messages through commercials and billboards to a brand that customers interact with all of the time, Greatrex said. It’s a new type of marketing for the soft drink company, Greatrex admitted, but he said it is a necessary one. “Brands need to pioneer, they need to explore, and they need to develop new ways to form relationships with the consumer,” Greatrex said. “We’re putting ourselves out there.”

The Yard launched on June 1 in China, where Sprite has its highest market share, but it plans to launch to the portal in the U.S. this month.