Social Vending, TV Ad Tagging & Marketing Convergence
Earlier this week PepsiCo announced the Pepsi Social Vending machine which allows consumers to interact with a vending machine in unique, digitally enabled way. You can gift a drink to a friend in your social network who'd get redemption code by text and use it to pick up their soda at any other social vending machine. And you can also gift a soda to an stranger in another city as a gift. The vending machine also displays Pepsi Refresh Project ideas.The week before we launched the first of its kind IntoNow Pepsi Max tagging experiment letting consumers tag our MLB advertisements and receive a coupon reward in return that can be redeemable in retail. These two very different announcements may have nothing in common on the surface, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
The promise of convergence is quickly becoming a reality. Our consumers do not live in digital worlds that are separate from their physical realities (interestingly, this was my key message at the Ad Age Media Maven awards two years ago). Nor do they treat televisions as a technology independent and separate from computers or mobile phones. Those worlds are blurring and brands must respond to that. With that in mind, here are some thoughts that I believe will influence marketing over the next decade.
- Every device and product can be a connected device. Connect your devices. This may seem like a cliché but the truth is so far very few devices are truly connected ones. That's all about to change. For us at Pepsi, we recognize that our fountains, vending machines, cans, bottles and even trucks are fundamentally media. In more and more scenarios they can also be interactive media that can be linked to the digital world. That's where the Pepsi Social Vending machine enters the picture. A hyper-local physical product is your connection to your global, social graph.
- Television advertising is dead as television advertising. There's no shortage of column inches dedicated to the death of television advertising. But that misses the point. The fundamentals of television advertising are changing dramatically. No more can you think about it in isolation. Rather your television advertisement is the trailer for deeper online engagement or as in the case with the Into Networks experiment, the access point to specific experiences that could be coupon, game or content centric. Creatives need to think about TV through a different lens - through the lens of it being one touchpoint in a broader consumer engagement strategy. Never start with a TV campaign.
- People must be at the center of every business. Make it happen. This is another one that may sound like a cliché but demands mention. In business we often put the wrong words at the heart of our thinking (for my business it maybe consumption, for an airline its seats and for a publisher its audiences), where as at the heart of every business need to be the people who don't just consume the product but also badge it, talk about it, frame experiences around it and choose to bring it into their lives either themselves or through their networks. The Social Vending machine takes us in that direction with the gifting opportunities. It is fundamentally about focusing on fun things people would want to do versus just on ways to sell more of a product efficiently.
- Digital Innovation is table stakes for any brand that desires relevance. Since my joining PepsiCo Beverages, we've conducted more tests and launched more proof of concepts than we can barely support. We do this because we recognize that technology is having dramatic effects on how our consumers associate with brands, make purchase decisions collaboratively and consume our products. Everyday we're researching and testing. The benefit - we get to learn quickly what works and what our consumers care about. That maks a big difference. However, betting on the right horses is hard. Success isn't just about experimenting a lot, it is also about placing strategic bets otherwise you dilute your brand's equity. Betting on the right horses will get harder. If tagging TV commercials doesn't take off, we may look stupid a year or two from now. On a side note, IntoNetworks was bought by Yahoo a day after we launched our experiment. That's an endorsement of the technology.
- Metrics need to be much more sophisticated. We like to believe that we're entering an age where everything can be measured. That couldn't be further from the truth. The technological and cultural changes we are experiences far outpaces evolutions in marketing measurement. We need to learn so much more about what drives behavior, how the dynamics of influence work and what marketing activities (technological or otherwise) truly influence sales. Currently, those metrics are relatively simplistic and the organizations that invest in measurement in proprietary ways will get ahead. With both the social vending and the tag an advertisement efforts, the metrics will need to be very different. We have no benchmarks or models to work off.
- Engagement must be the mantra through real-time marketing. There's no doubt in my mind that thinking of marketing as the search for the next big idea is going to seem trite and superficial a few years from now. Momentum for a big brand won't come from creating splash in Times Square alone and then getting media to surround it. Nurturing continuos, culturally relevant relationships that connect the brand's meaning with consumer intent in the context of their cultural groups will be what matters. The operative word is continuous.
Look at your marketing calendar and ask yourself, are you truly creating continuous relationships with your consumers? Everyday, that social vending machine should have different, experiences that are synchronized with how we're communicating to our consumers digitally, in retail and through trade promotions. Will it get there? Yes. The same applies for tagging an advertisement, the engagement should change by the day based on what's going on in the real world and what the brand is trying to accomplish.
This couldn't be a more exciting time to be in marketing and the thoughts above reflect just some of the transformations that companies are going through. There's a lot more to come but I thought I'd share some of the factors that influence what we do in the marketplace and why.
Follow me on Twitter (@shivsingh) for more insights on digital strategy and social media.
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