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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | JANUARY 22, 2001 PERSPECTIVE By Heather Green There's No Fizz in Pepsi's E-Promotion Just when Net advertising is in dire need of new ideas, the cola giant's new online foray, in partnership with Yahoo!, seems pretty stale
No such luck, at least in the case of PepsiCo's and Yahoo's latest Net-ad foray. The two behemoths formed an alliance last year aimed at raising Pepsi's profile online with the under-25 crowd. The first campaign was clever and perfectly in line with the types of promotions we expect from Pepsi. Last summer, Pepsi splashed Yahoo's logo on 1.5 billion cans while Yahoo put up a co-branded site that allowed consumers to collect bottle-cap points to exchange for prizes. GIMMICKRY. With fanfare, the companies last week announced the second salvo in their partnership. But this one, called "Your Vote Counts, powered by Yahoo! Broadcast," is virtually all gimmick with seemingly little value for consumers. The "Your Vote Counts" promotion gives consumers the chance to vote online for their favorite Pepsi TV commercial of the past 15 years. The really exciting part, promise Yahoo and Pepsi, is that consumers' votes will determine which commercial will be shown during the postgame Super Bowl show. The trilling press release trumpets this inspiring tidbit: "Okay...so you might be thinking, 'What makes this announcement different?' Well, this particular promotion allows an online audience to steer the course of something that will occur offline, on a completely different medium!" Now, that's real empowerment, don't you agree? That really is fun interaction with the brand! Combining Internet and traditional marketing is exactly where the online industry needs to focus. And boosting branding efforts and the usefulness of a product to consumers through online direct marketing and digital interaction make sense. This promotion by Yahoo and Pepsi, though, is nothing more than navel gazing. It's fake inclusion and weirdly offensive. LACKING SUBTLETY. What's fun about voting to pick a commercial that will be shown to me? Is it cheering to learn that Pepsi believes its commercials are so much a part of my psyche that I'd be entertained by this promotion? Does Pepsi take itself so seriously that it thinks I care enough to watch those commercials again online and then vote for the one I will eventually see on TV? I don't really want to be reminded of how much I am marketed to, to tell you the truth. And since these are "classic" TV commercials, I'm not even seeing something new. Instead, I'm supposed to help celebrate Pepsi's history of commercialization. Sophisticated marketing should be more subtle than that. Maybe I missed a key point in the evolution of mass consumer society. Perhaps our consumerism is so over-the-top that people would find it amusing to take an active role in choosing the marketing messages designed to get them to buy sugar water. So, Pepsi is either very cleverly aware or stunningly naive. But there is one thing the companies are surely not being naive about: our mercenary interests. This promotion isn't just about consumers expressing their TV ad tastes. At the end of the day, "Your Vote Counts" is merely a sweepstakes. Of the people who cast a vote, 100 will win $2,001. BIGGER DATABASE. As of Friday evening, more than 7,000 people had voted. Only registered Yahoo members can vote and get a chance to win the sweepstakes. This way, Yahoo will be able to increase the number of people registered for its services. By collecting registration information, Yahoo can create a bigger database of people to whom it can market its partners' messages. To me, the promotion comes across as a setup. If lots of people sign up to vote, Pepsi and Yahoo will probably trumpet this as an inclusionary marketing campaign that shows the affinity people have for the Pepsi brand. I would bet that most people just see it as a chance to win free money. In that case, it does little to further our understanding of what makes online marketing unique.  Green covers the Internet for BusinessWeek in New York  | | |
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