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Twitterposted 04th April 2011
How to win friends and lose money
We ask what went wrong with the Pepsi Refresh social media campaign.
With Pepsi's Refresh campaign, the brand put their faith in social media and by the everyday standards of the medium – succeeded. 3.5 million "likes" and 60,000 Twitter followers isn't anything to scoff at; but with a 5% drop in market share, did they strike the right balance between traditional and social media?
SASHA SAYS
"Pepsi executed the perfect SM project – at least in the way that every single SM agency, planner and SM “guru” touts it. The results speak of the kind of interaction stats that are the goal of every brand but perhaps people engaged with a campaign that had absolutely nothing to do with a soft drink."
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If anything, I lean towards viewing Pepsi Refresh as a Pearl Harbor – a disaster that marks the passing of one approach to social media, but which may serve as a harbinger of future triumph. Pepsi Refresh was an attempt to apply a centrally directed traditional campaign approach to social media. You can’t use a battle plan intended for battleships if you have a fleet of aircraft carriers.
To too many people social media has become the hammer that sits alone in their tool box. Pepsi switched from traditional to social media rather than running a side by side test. I personally think there is a lot of social media Kool-Aid floating about – this doesn't mean that it doesn't have value, but it isn't the answer to every problem.
In terms of getting your message to the largest number of people (no matter how ill targeted they sometimes are... like feminine hygiene product ads in the breaks during Top Gear on Dave?!?) http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/tv/2/ traditional media still rules. The real problem is perceiving the medium as a threat to traditional media advertising instead of seeing it as a complementary, and valuable, practice.
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