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HUGE's Pepsi Momentum outlasts the Super Bowl

While many media analysts were biting their nails over Pepsi's historical decision to withdraw their $20 million 2010 Superbowl budget, and redirect it toward HUGE's Refresh Everything digital social grant platform, early results show Pepsi is well ahead of the game.

Pepsi cornered the market with pre-Super Bowl buzz.  According to Nielsen, a full 21.6% of online messages linking a brand with the Super Bowl made reference to Pepsi over the last couple of months. The first round of submissions for Refresh Everything, which accepted 1000 initial entries, filled within 72 hours, without any mass media campaign.

So how does one sustain post Super Bowl buzz? The answer is clear: turn the program upside down.

Andrew Katz, senior marketing manager for Pepsi, told MediaPost of the most talked about Super Bowl ads, "everybody forgets about it a week later. How do we engage people as opposed to just talking to them?" Refresh Everything is a conversation between Pepsi and the community, where people decide which ideas win funding. "Once the grants get awarded," said Katz, "it's really about telling the stories of the people who are doing these great things."

Pepsi's Refresh Everything is poised to become the most buzz-worthy social platform of 2010.

For HUGE partner Gene Liebel, this is just the beginning. "All of the products we love to use online -- whether it's Amazon, or Google or Netflix, they're changing every few days -- they're iterating," he told MediaPost. "We're going to have even more engagement and more traffic as we optimize the hundreds of little interactions and rules about how we connect with people."

The San Francisco Chronicle praised the Pepsi/HUGE collaboration noting that Refresh Everything has "called the right play for a rapidly changing advertising game in which consumers are becoming the mass media that carry the message." Jessica Ong, director of online media and search for Internet analytics company Compete Inc., said "It's really a good example of content that gives consumers incentives to come back and interact with the site. It is going to open the eyes and ears of those working at other brands to consider online channels."

As Bonin Bough, PepsiCo's global director of digital and social media, tells it: "The project is about creating a movement, not just a moment."