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Pepsi Bows Out of Super Bowl XLIV

December 17th, 2009 by AV Flox in marketing

PepsiCo, which was the biggest advertiser during last February’s Super Bowl broadcast, has decided to sit out the game this year and focus its resources on online advertising. This comes after 23-year streak of using the massive sports event as the centerpiece for its marketing strategy.

“In 2010, each of our beverage brands has a strategy and marketing platform that will be less about a singular event,” Frank Cooper, senior vice president of PepsiCo Americas Beverages, told the Wall Street Journal.

Pepsi’s new strategy is a combination of web-focused advertising and cause-marketing. They plan to kick off “Pepsi Refresh Project” in a few weeks, a program that enables consumers to pick community projects for the softdrink giant to sponsor. Pepsi told the Wall Street Journal $20 million of its ad dollars have been set aside for the grants in 2010.

As for the web, Pepsi says it will spend 60% more on online ads in 2010 than it did this year. This, they know, is the best way to reach younger audiences who comprise Pepsi’s primary target–as well as to keep consumers engaged.

“You can’t just go to market with a TV ad anymore,” says Lee Clow, chief creative officer of Omnicom Group’s TBWA Worldwide, the agency behind the new campaign, and one of the creators of Apple’s infamous 1984 Super Bowl commercial.

He might be right, but the pioneering decision carries some risk. First, it leaves the field open to Coke, which made its comeback to Super Bowl advertising in 2007 after an eight-year break, and has been giving Pepsi some serious competition since. Two, consumers have come to expect Pepsi’s entertaining spots and their absence could trigger a backlash.

Pepsi, however, has weighed the risks.

“Brands should not blindly anchor themselves to history,” Cooper said.

We’ll see how that pans out.

Information from the Wall Street Journal, via @Nordette_Verite.

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Tags: advertising, cola wars, Pepsi

What’s Happening?

November 20th, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter

I can’t remember my first tweet, but I do remember one thing–it did not answer the question “what are you doing?” Conceived originally as a mobile status service, for years Twitter operated under that prompt.

“People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question,” writes co-founder Biz Stone. Users were “seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, ‘What’s happening?’ A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive.”

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering “What are you doing?” with “Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,” at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”

In a post discussing the change, social web genius Brian Solis elaborates on how we have grown to use Twitter: “Our updates on Twitter symbolize so much more than we may realize. If, for but a moment, we can catch a fleeting glimpse of our personal significance right here, right now, we would recognize our instrumental role in the complete transformation in how information is reported, discovered, broadcast, and consumed. Perhaps most significantly, Twitter represents a collective collaboration that manifests our ability to unconsciously connect kindred voices through the experiences that move us. As such, Twitter is a human seismograph. Through it, we feel everything that moves us.”

Yes, but this has always been the case for most of us. What does the change actually mean?

“We don’t expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter,” said Stone. “But maybe it’ll make it easier to explain to your dad.”

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The Web Moves Toward Inclusion

November 1st, 2009 by AV Flox in intarwebz

The Associated Press is reporting that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved the use of scripts other than the standard Latin characters for web domains.

After years of debate, the decision to make the web more inclusive in this way by the nonprofit board’s 15 voting members received a standing ovation after a week-long series of meetings in Seoul, Korea.

This will allow governments to submit requests for specific non-Latin domain names, as soon as mid-November, and we’ll start seeing them used early next year. Non-Latin versions of “.com” and “.org” won’t be allowed for a few more years, however.

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Internet! You’re OLD!

October 30th, 2009 by AV Flox in intarwebz

The question of when the internet was born is a matter of some debate, but if you go by PC World’s version of things, then the web turned 40 yesterday:

On October 29, 1969, the Internet came in not with a bang, but with a “lo.”

Letter by letter, UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock sent a message from his school’s host computer to another computer at Stanford Research Institute. Kleinrock was trying to write “login,” starting up a remote time-sharing system, but the system crashed after two letters, and lo! The Internet was born with the first data message sent between two networked computers.

To be fair, the creation of the Internet was peppered with other milestones that could be considered more or less historic. After all, at the core of the Internet was packet-switching–the process of breaking down data into blocks and routing them individually–and in 1968 Donald Davies of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory gave the first public presentation of the idea.

But if we can all agree that communication–e-mail, chat, social networking–is what makes the Internet tick, Kleinrock’s first message was the most significant early step towards what we have today.

Look how far we’ve come–and how much further we’ve yet to go. The internet started with a lo, evolved into a social stream–what will come next? How much more pervasive will it be in another 40 years?

I can’t wait to find out.

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