No Man’s Blog

Quick note:
In this post I basically compare two types of marketing that are non comparable.
It still makes an interesting read though

When John, Anjali and few others tweeted about their votes for a Pepsi Refresh project I clicked through and in 20 seconds I was in a ’standing ovation’ mode. Such awesome, admirable, bold, new-media-twitteratis-wet-dream of a project, a project we only dared dreaming about in a ‘what if’ blog posts when talking about the future of marketing
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And here it is - Pepsi (fuckin) did it. They did not spend money on the annual advertising frenzy that is the Super-Bowl. Instead, Pepsi would spend $20 million funding community renewal events across the U.S. through the Refresh Everything platform. Check out all the details, it is beautifully executed, with healthy looking facebook community, some smart celebrity endorsement and all that. They seem to have ticked all the right boxes on a social-media-powered-campaign list.

R E S P E C T

Unsurprisingly it got loads of attention. Big guns praising as well as some early research findings showing the campaign has already paid off in terms of increased media coverage.

But the Nielsen report looks specifically at Super Bowl related conversations or so called ‘earned media’ so what they found is actually quite obvious - make a bold, well-orchestrated new-news statement and you’ll get talked about. And since Coke didn’t have anything major to stand out with around the Super Bowl frenzy, Pepsi got most of the attention.

But then I recalled the other (social) media frenzy that was around the Coke Happiness Machine viral (1.5 million view on the official video) couple of weeks ago and it got me thinking: in terms of talkability or ‘earned attention’,Happiness or Goodness - who wins the ‘conversation’? So I quickly configured a crude monitoring dashboard…

In the RED corner a $20K or so slippy idea. In the BLUE corner over $20 million bold initiative. Let’s take a look at the numbers:

Volume of conversations since 1st of Jan 2010:

Here is what Pepsi ‘earned’ to date:

Here is what coke happiness machine earned to date:

If you are a cynical, purely ROI driven marketeer, the argument that the Coke ’shtick’ has generated 10% of the media coverage of the Pepsi project with only 0.1% of the investment is enormously seductive. Yet it’s wrong.

This grossly inadequate comparison actually tells us a good story on the future of marketing. Both projects should be compared to all other brands who did spend millions of dollars on some pretty spectacu-lousy superbowl ads that no one will remember half an hour after the game (or generally brands that keep spending loads of money on insignificant, bland advertising).

If you want to get talked about your best hope is to try and do loads of small, cheap, surprising, awesome things like the Coke Happiness shtick AS WELL AS big, bold, game-changing initiatives. Everything else will most probably fall into the obscure world of uninterestingness (which, frankly, is where 95% of marketing communications naturally reside).

BTW soon enough, the idea of big brands spending loads of CSR money via a shouty crowd-sourcing initiatives will become old news. I bet you that the next big brand that will do something similar will get less than half the attention that Pepsi rightly enjoys with Refresh Everything (but that doesn’t mean that brands shouldn’t invest loads of money in making a change for good).

Think both small and big but most important is to think different. What say you?

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