Beyoncé’s performance during last year’s Super Bowl may rank among the best halftime shows of all time (according to both Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone), but sponsor Pepsi figured out too late that consumers didn’t associate the event with its brand.
“We learned that last year, [Pepsi] did not get enough credit for Beyoncé and the Super Bowl, believe it or not,” said Claudia Cahill, chief content officer for The Content Collective, at the recent Digital Entertainment World expo. The Content Collective is the internal branded entertainment and marketing group for media agency OMD, whose clients including Pepsico, JCPenney, Lowe’s and Hershey’s.
The soft drink company wasn’t going to make the same mistake this year for Bruno Mars’ shot at the big game and started laying groundwork a month before with anostalgic ad imagining the first-ever halftime. Then a week before the Super Bowl, Pepsi (NYSE: PEP) put on a halftime show at the Grammys. It helped that both events were broadcast on the same network.
“We went to CBS and said, ‘We want to create a halftime show,’ and they acted like we were crazy,” Cahill remembered. “But we ended up working it out, and we used 2 1/2 minutes of commercial inventory to produce a segment that mirrored the Grammys but in a real Pepsi way—and bringing the NFL into it.”
The strategy worked. “The response on Twitter was over 85 percent positive throughout the performance, and after even higher, which as you guys know 60 percent is usually really good,” she said. “And all of our IAG scores and recall on the work and brand positioning—everything was incredibly positive.”
“Some things lend themselves to live events,” added Jim Lanzone, CEO of CBSInteractive. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that three of the top live social events of all time were the last three Grammys—the Super Bowl and the election being the other two. It just is one of those events that people do want to talk about, and these last three have been the three highest-rated in 20 years. So it’s interesting that the social conversation has led to higher ratings. It’s led to more interest in the program.”
Pepsi primed the pump for the Super Bowl halftime show at the Grammys, then produced a cool intro to Bruno Mars’ set that linked the music to the setting (the New York City skyline) to the brand.
What works is “being contextual to that programming and positioning it as entertainment,” Cahill advised. “It’s not a 30-second TV commercial.”
Cahill’s not a fan of the term “branded entertainment,” by the way. “It should just be entertainment, period,” she explained. “If it’s entertaining, super. If a brand is involved, great. But it shouldn’t be the thing that leads the thinking.”
Pepsi’s next stop will be the Academy Awards—more prime live real estate, as 97 percent of Influenster’s community of social-media tastemakers planning to watch the ceremony said they'll post about it on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. With Coke bowing out this year, Pepsi is sponsoring the year’s biggest non-NFL broadcast for the first time since 2005, teaming with Regal Cinemas (NYSE: RGC) to give away tickets to the red carpet and a viewing party.
“For a client like Pepsi, their brand proposition right now is capturing the excitement of now, so it’s all about spontaneity and living in the moment,” Cahill said. “We have made a conscious decision to invest in live-entertainment verticals—so the Grammys, the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards—because of the ability to develop a runoff during the event and a follow-up to the event, and everything that happens in social media lifts up those ratings. So for us it’s not just what happens during the show—it’s what happens before during and after.”
No comments:
Post a Comment