Creative Review The Pepsi Refresh Campaign
Right now, the Pepsi Refresh Campaign is only being run in the US, but there are strong rumours that it will be rolled out in Europe sometime soon.
Created by TBWA Worldwide, the project involves Pepsi aiming to give away $1.2 million in grants every month to fund good causes across three key areas: arts and music; education; and communities.
The big difference about this campaign is that it has had very limited conventional media support. Instead, it’s been driven by social media.
To my knowledge, it’s potentially the largest social media/interactive campaign ever undertaken and this has made it a very bold move for Pepsi. There is a whacking great big idea at the core – to enable people to make a genuine difference to their community and to encourage deep engagement and long term involvement. Yet it has so many different facets.
Being driven by Pepsi, but allowed to swell through social media channels, the campaign moved into many different arenas and tumbled into initiatives led by consumers, crowdsourced or inspired by topical global issues.
Pepsi has kept the campaign refreshed by regularly introducing new activations. One of my favourites is the world’s first ‘Social Vending System’, a vending machine with built-in links to social networking sites which allows for “Random Acts of Refreshment”.
Pepsi pushed technological boundaries and embraced the trend of social networking by allowing customers to send friends, colleagues or those in need drinks they could retrieve from an actual vending machine.
The machines feature a video touch screen: people can send a drink to a friend by entering their name, mobile number and a text message. The friend gets a mobile coupon they can redeem at one of the machines. It can also be used to send free drinks to complete strangers – for example, in a city hit by natural disasters, Pepsi suggests.
I like the fact that this campaign embraces unconventional promotional marketing. There’s no on-pack promotion, no collect for tokens mechanic. It works by making you feel something, unmotivated by greed or selfishness, but by a desire to do good.
It’s given Pepsi a much needed personality, and differentiated it from Coke. In these times of the so called “kindness revolution”, it builds on a key marketing trend. It’s not delivering a brand monologue and asking us to open our wallets based on admiration, it’s serving the audience.
What’s the outcome? Over 80 million votes registered. 3.5 million ‘likes’ on Facebook. 60,000 Twitter followers. And a whole bunch of positive PR. You have to admire Pepsi for having a crack at it. This is smart, experimental marketing which has certainly got people talking right across the US.