Watch all video interviews from the 2010 IAB Annual Conference.
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When he shows up at an advertising conference, Frank Cooper, Chief Marketing Officer, Sparkling Beverages, Pepsi, must feel like a Venture Capitalist walking into a room full of underfunded type A entrepreneurs. They look at him and see dollar signs. He does, after all, walk around with a sizeable annual marketing budget in his pocket. With money like that, Frank can make a company’s day, week or year.
Frank spoke to a packed house at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual conference in sunny Carlsbad California. The message he wanted to send to the IAB membership, most of whom would like to land Pepsi as a customer, was for vendors to think about social media and the concept of connecting people. In short, how can Pepsi add value to the consumer’s life within a social media framework. If an agency or technology provider can answer those questions, Frank is open to having a conversation.
Pepsi evaluates marketing opportunities against three drivers that all create value for the brand:
- First, does a marketing initiative help Pepsi increase the number of transactions the brand has with consumers.
- Second, will it create a premium that Pepsi can charge against the competition.
- Finally, will it build brand value that will establish loyalty among a core group of consumers.
Pepsi went through this type of analysis when it pulled out of the Super Bowl after 23 straight years as a mainstay of memorable Super Bowl 30 second TV spots. While advertising in the Super Bowl is a source of pride, and certainly makes the bottlers and other constituents in the Pepsi ecosystem happy, Frank’s team believed the money could be better spent, and more closely aligned with the 3 value drivers, through alternative channels.
In 2010, it is more important for Pepsi to engage a smaller, loyal consumer base and create a foundation to grow on, than to reach a massive audience that big event marketing, such as the Super Bowl, can deliver. Online was a big beneficiary of this shift in Pepsi’s focus towards finding and engaging current and prospective brand ambassadors.
An example of a successful online initiative is the DEWmocracy campaign, which Frank talks about in the interview.
From the Pepsi press release:
DEWmocracy 2 challenges DEW fans to create the next Mountain Dew product from flavor to package design to an advertising campaign. Most importantly, DEWmocracy is a truly democratic process that has been engineered to harness the power of the social web to empower brand loyalists to create new products, by the people, for the people…
Setting this campaign apart from similar initiatives is the brand’s genuine desire to connect with consumers in social environments where they naturally hang out. Rather than relying on a single web platform, DEWmocracy 2 applies a variety of tools to best power the activity at hand; from closed forums to open platforms. This includes DEW labs, a private online community composed of the brand’s most loyal, hard-core fans, innovative uses of Twitter, USTREAM, a 12seconds.tv video contest and a dedicated YouTube channel [and youtube.com/mountaindew].
In April 2010, three user created products will launch at retail outlets throughout the United States. From here, competition will again ignite among DEW loyalists to keep their product of choice, or contribution, on shelf as only one of the three beverage innovations will become a permanent product in Mountain Dew’s portfolio when the final decision is made in time for Labor Day 2010.
The DEWmocracy 2 campaign builds on an online game that was at the heart of the DEWmocracy 1 campaign. Mountain Dew takes advantage of all the social media tools at its disposal to find, connect with and engage both consumers (who are empowered to vote) and professionals interested in becoming the new marketers and brand experts for the company. Come up with a good idea, put it in front of Mountain Dew loyalists, and you could potentially go from the world of under-employed creative type to the person that helps shape a Fortune 500 companies new product offerings and line extensions.
To participate in the contest, anybody that fancies themselves as the next Don Draper can submit a 12-second video on 12seconds.tv and outline his or her ideas for marketing three new Mountain Dew line extensions.
Pepsi is currently working on the Refresh Campaign. There’s a destination micro-site for the campaign and, of course, a facebook fan page.
