Saturday, September 26, 2009
Pepsi and Will.i.am team up for a social networking experience
Pepsi is providing us with a really good example of consumer generated advertising (cga) with its new campaign from Will.i.am and LMFAO that allows consumers to remix different music segments and to post them online. While the general concept of participatory advertising is no longer new, we can see that the levels of engagement continue to increase as marketers find more creative ways to bring consumers “into” the brand and to place the brand “inside” consumers. In the process of creating their own mixes, consumers also join a community through collaboration and sharing; yet another twist on Web 2.0, social networking. The level of complicity on the part of consumers—in other words, their willingness to participate in marketing schemes—is unprecedented. Check it out on YouTube and let me know what you think!
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4 comments:
I think this is a really cool idea! Most people know who Will.I.AM is, so right off the bat people are able to connect to him and the advertisement. I think this is a great tactic to get people to go to the pepsi website because music has become incredibly influential and important to our society and country as a whole. More and more people everyday are writing and performing their own songs. Because of this, I feel like a good amount of people will go to this website and make their own mixes. This gives them a chance to be creative, connect with other people out there who are also creating their own mixes and engage in the pepsi product all at once.
By the end of this youtube video featuring Will.i.am and LMFAO, they ask you to participate by going onto ultimaterefresh.com. This website is actually another youtube account. So, it is very interesting to note that they keep the concept only on Youtube. I also found out that you can eiter a) record or b) produce. Now you have to keep LMFAO "la,la,la" in the remix, but this concept is pretty awesome because you don't have to be able to play an instrument or able to sing, you can also just choose videos that you like and make a collaboration with it. It's kind of like making your own music with your own pick of vocals, melodies, chords, and percussions. And! after reading how to do this, it's pretty awesome and I feel that I just accomplished an occupation (a producer) without having to get up.
This campaign with Will.i.am and LMFAO is a great new idea that really gets people to participate and engage in activities that promote both the artists and Pepsi as well. Since both of these artists are well known and popular, they attract attention to Pepsi and create a buzz about a product that is already very established. Although I did not know about the campaign until I saw this blog post, I think that it has the potential to create a lot of positive attention for Will.i.am, LMFAO, and Pepsi.
In the video they ask you to visit the website ultimaterefresh.com and participate. So far, there are 1937 subscribers to the site. People seem to be getting involved with the site by either making videos or commenting on the videos others have put up. In addition to this website, there is a corresponding facebook account, featuring a big Pepsi can as the profile picture. It is interesting that there are so many social media outlets today that can all be linked together for one cause. Hundreds of people have commented on the status updates on the facebook page and they have 250,220 fans. This really shows how much people are engaging in these activities and promoting the Pepsi brand.
I think this new campaign, which allows consumers to remix different music segments and post them online, is a really neat approach to consumer generated advertising. I went on the Pepsi website and found that this is just one several Pepsi’s campaigns that is consumer generated. Among the ones I found are Pepsi Rockband, in which the consumer can post a video of themselves playing Rockband on the website, and Pepsi Racing in which the consumer can race cars and compete with other people.
-Julia DePaul
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