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Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More
Pepsi is launching a big rebranding campaign today, and the company says social media is going to play a crucial role. Specifically, PepsiCo Global Head of Digital Shiv Singh tells me that the biggest online piece of the campaign is a “social media cheat sheet” called the #NOW board — it has, in fact, taken over the Pepsi website.
The board is built on top of Pulse, the social media visualization platform that Pepsi launched last fall. Looking at the RSS feeds from across the Web, as well as the firehose of wants being shared through Twitter and bit.ly (with help from startup SocialFlow), Singh says the #NOW board presents the pop culture stories that are hottest in social media at any given moment, presented in easily-digestible form.
Beyond serving as a news aggregator, Singh says the site will include other features, like the ability for celebrities to pose challenges to their fans, and exclusive deals courtesy of sites like Thrillist. And naturally, the content can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.
That all sounds fun, but what does that have to do with a food and beverage company? Well, the theme of the campaign is “Live for Now,” and it tries to reconnect the Pepsi brand with, as Singh puts it, “the heart of pop culture.” He argues that “the more deeply integrated” Pepsi is with broader pop culture trends, the better the company does.
My other question: Are people actually going to return to a Pepsi-branded site as a source of news? I mean, any news website is probably going to have advertising and sponsorships, and sure, we’re not probably not talking about hard-hitting journalism here, but it still feels a little weird to treat a Pepsi-owned site as a “real” news aggregator. Singh counters:
In the last few years we’ve seen people in general care less about the source of an experience or who’s creating the content, and more about the experience itself. People care less whether it’s a TV network that’s creating a really funny piece of video or whether a brand is.
The argument carries some weight, when you think about how ads like the Old Spice guy have become popular viral content. So is this advertising? Is it content? It’s a little bit of both, and it sounds like that’s what Pepsi wants.
Pepsi is a carbonated drink popular around the world. It was first produced in the U.S. in the 1890s. They’re currently running the Pepsi Refresh Project, a way to crowd-source ideas that deserve funding.
Learn more SocialFlow is the first social media optimization technology to apply a scientific approach to understanding the real-time value of content on the social graph. With unparalleled access to the Twitter and Facebook data streams, the company developed the SocialFlow AttentionScore™ technology that is able to understand and quantify audience, attention, topics and engagement to provide an accurate value assessment of social media content for brands and businesses. This technology powers the company’s Optimized Publisher to help clients extract...
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