The World of Coca-Cola is not really about Coca-Cola. At least not about the brown liquid in the bottles and cans.

Like its previous incarnation next to Underground Atlanta, the new World of Coca-Cola is about the marketing of Coca-Cola, the branding, the iconography. As such, it is the perfect institution for our time. People come here not to learn about or celebrate the product itself but to revel in how the product has been pitched to us for more than a century.

Brant Sanderlin/Staff (ENLARGE)

Karin Kidd consults a map of the new World of Coca-Cola, which celebrates how the drink became a pop culture icon.

MORE The New World of Coke

The real thing, apparently, is the joy of being a consumer.

Coke is, of course, more than bottled sugar water, just like Levi's is more than pants and iPod is more than a hard drive. Coca-Cola has woven itself so skillfully through popular culture around the world that it is a series of images and ideas as much as a drink. From Haddon Sundblom's famous magazine-ad paintings of Santa Claus kicking back with a Coke in the 1930s to the CGI polar bears that today's kids love, Coke has generated a series of nostalgic associations that people embrace the way they do the pop songs that played when they were falling in love.

How perfect, then, that the biggest artistic display in the new World is devoted to Andy Warhol — one master of image manipulating the images of another master of image.

Downtown's new temple of pop consumerism is museumlike, without really being a museum. It uses the structure and language of the museum, though, which will help justify lots of field trips when school reopens in the fall. Hey class, let's vote: Who wants to go to the High Museum of Art, and who would rather go to the World of Coke?

Signs are placed outside big display cases full of old Coke advertising and memorabilia, giving little "history" lessons: "In Coca-Cola advertising throughout the years, a spirit of joyful living is the common thread against a backdrop of changing trends and fashions."

But the World of Coca-Cola is not really a museum. It is an ad itself, filled with ads, about ads — the ultimate product placement.

You walk into an entry dominated by six giant Coke bottles, then move into a loft to wait for the first movie. In the loft, there are 50 Coke signs on the walls, 18 Coke signs hanging from the ceiling, two display cases containing about 30 Coke artifacts (ads), and five video screens. Audio clips of old Coke ads play.

The movie, "Inside the Happiness Factory," is billed as a documentary — tongue-in-cheek presumably. It's a slick, six-minute animated ad. Later in the tour, folks line up for "In Search of the Secret Formula," a nine-minute ad that utilizes all the latest 4-D gimmickry — vibrating seats, little bursts of air and water. The formula turns out to be a checklist of slogans. But hey, we got spritzed!

Of course, this is not completely new. The original World opened in 1990 with this same basic philosophy. The new World is just bigger and fizzier. It's been interesting, however, to watch this new World being "positioned," though, as a proximate partner to the Georgia Aquarium and a still-on-the-drawing boards civil rights museum.

Just as Coke figured out decades ago it was selling emotional connection as much as flavored water, it has taken the lead in building a tribute to its own salesmanship. Other companies offer tributes to themselves (the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., and Hershey's Chocolate World in Hershey, Pa. do it up big), but none focuses so much on the selling of the thing over the thing itself.

And we pay, $15 a pop for adults, to hear about how we've been sold to. From a marketing point of view, it doesn't get any sweeter than that.