One of the biggest brands in the world has traded their $20 million Superbowl budget for a $20 million dollar social media campaign. If you’re at all like me, you can’t wait to see how this one turns out.
The news comes from Adhack, the People Powered Advertising Platform, in a release that shows the potential of crowd-sourcing and social media as a marketing tool. They’ve even included a bunch of nice stats that seem to show that Pepsi is making the right decision.
The Show Us Your Balls Campaign Stats
From James Sherrett, Adhack founder,
The campaign solicited ad creators to produce a TV commercial for a fictitious beer company. The cliff-hanger ad was promoted during the SuperBowl-commercials hype via YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Viewers were solicited to submit various alternative endings. A panel of judges, including the original creators, then selected a script to produce as the sequel. View the “Show Us Your Balls” Super Bowl campaign: http://AdHack.com/Balls
So what impact can a campaign like Show Us Your Balls have?
Sherrett goes into details:
Total Production Cost at Market Value: $40,000 Total Placement Cost: $0.00. The ads were uploaded free of charge on YouTube.com. Total Marketing & Promotions Budget: $700 for 2 electronic press releases. Active Campaign Promotion: 1 month. Campaign Lifetime: Continues to date. Total Campaign Views to Date: 63,637 views Show Us Your Balls (Part 1): 37,141 views Show Us Your Balls (AdHack ending): 18,289 views What didn’t happen (Crowdsourced ending): 8,207 views
Sherrett explains the lesson here for marketers of all types, and it’s all about shelf life.
social media, crowdsourcing and community engagement provide a longer shelf life for ad campaigns. “If you have a plan in place to take the equity (built up from having fans create the ads), and you use that equity to activate further activity and interest within the larger community, then you have a true platform for your brand. Look at Doritos for example
Doritos, a PepsiCo brand, saw huge success with their video submission contest last year. They asked people to submit their own Doritos commercial withga chance to have it aired during hte Super Bowl. Even cooler, if the ad makes the #1 spot on the USA TODAY Ad Meter, the wining submission would get $1 million. Game on.
Your Thought
We all know that money isn’t everything when it comes to engaging using social media, so I’m very interested to see how this plays out. My suspicion is that the majority of that budget will still go towards traditional advertising promoting the social media campaign, but only time will tell.
Is Pepsi setting the stage for a marketing coup?
Disclosure: Giant Ant Media , a Vancouver Creative Agency that I work with, created the Show us Your Balls Video.
More: Adhack Blog
Photo Cred: A.Majeed.Al.Mutawee
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