Pepsi's refreshing ad strategy 2010

In a bold strategic move, Pepsi has dropped its entire Super Bowl advertising budget to focus on the new Pepsi Refresh Project. Under the Refresh Everything campaign, Pepsi will award grants for community-based projects proposed and selected by consumers. Pepsi has earmarked $20 million of its ad dollars for the grant initiative next year.

The move is an about-face for Pepsi, which was the biggest advertiser on last year's broadcast of the big game and has long made the National Football League championship the centerpiece of its marketing strategy. Pepsi has used the event, TV's priciest showcase for ads, to launch splashy spots starring celebrities such as Britney Spears, Cindy Crawford and Ozzy Osbourne.

The brand was the biggest advertiser during the Super Bowl last year. In the past, Pepsi’s advertising strategy used the major televised football event as a way to roll out some of its most memorable spots with celebrities like Britney Spears and Cindy Crawford. The shift aims to focus less on a singular event and more on cause-related marketing. Pepsi has also increased their online advertising budget by 60% for 2010.

Pic: WSJ

Branding online

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times. “Don’t judge a book by its cover!” Tell me when you bought a book that had a cover you didn't like? Yes... we all do it. Judging someone else using non-verbal cues to determine another person’s confidence, professionalism, honesty, attitude and success is part of human nature. And like people, similar cues are used by customers visiting your people, office, website to determine the quality of your products and services and professionalism of your business.

Customers use non-verbal, less-tangible, emotional symbols to asses your business, your brand image. So online branding and Web site branding is important to build the image of your business you want customers to have. Whether you want to be viewed as high quality or low cost or ultra luxurious, visually “dress” your business to reach that goal.

A good looking web site builds trust in your business and helps in starting a relationship with potential customers. Considering the average visitor to your Web site will judge you on your professionalism, honesty, and the success of your business in just three to four seconds ensuring that you score on the first look is important.

Online noise and teens

Today's teens inhabit a "digital marketing ecosystem" where their identities and interactions are virtually inseparable from the logos stamped all over them, new research suggests.

"It becomes a part of how they communicate with their friends," says Kathryn Montgomery, a communications professor at American University in Washington, D.C. "If they're incorporating brands into their profiles and communicating those with their friends, if the companies are inserting the products into the games young people play, if they're part of the use of mobile technology so there's a brand presence that follows their every move — that is creating a new kind of intimacy."

The brain doesn't reach full maturity until the early 20s and one of the puzzle pieces missing in adolescence is impulse control — a fact that will come as no surprise to any parent of a teen, she says.

"We're known for as long as branded communication has been around that you can't just shout at people, you have to interest and engage and entertain them," Cubbon says. "Most advertising online is still pretty much an announcement, it's noise."

Read full article here.

The rule of patience

Internet marketing is a business like any other. So it needs to be started and grown with sound business principles if you want to succeed. When you compare the number who have had such wild success, with all the businesses who have failed or never really taken flight online, you will find that the “overnight” millionaires are not the standard of what internet marketing is. The key to successful internet marketing is Search Engine Optimization or "SEO". It's obvious why Internet marketing is so popular, and will only continue to grow in the future. Internet Marketing is not the get-rich-quick scheme some may say it is. It requires a lot of hard work, patience, consistency.

So don't be depressed if no one visits your blog, website and comments on it daily. It would take much more time and exposure to reach the state of successful blogs. They have passed through the same path. But they didn't give up. Neither should you. You must understand that effective marketing is not something that is going to happen overnight. So keep posting, updating and building.

I go online. How abt u?

I just saw this ad on my yahoo page. Internet has seeped well into the suburbs and is gaining land all the time. It wouldn't be an understatement that soon we will find online payments happening from the so called godforsaken places too. This is a good sign as it saves time, money and effort. We are going online to check my bills, clear them, book my tickets and what not. The point is I am online and so are many of my friends.

This is a good sign for the marketer to push your brand presence online and ensure your availability when I browse. May be I will shop. May be I will recognize your brand when I walk into a store. You better be there.

Unless you want to be a touch me, feel me, get me product.

Online marketing going North

Just read some statistics about online media. Despite the fact that the global advertising industry will see an 8.5 percent decrease in spending by the end of this year, online marketing will rise 10.1 percent. That's the findings of a recent report from ZenithOptimedia which predicts that online marketing will be the only bright spot in an overall dull marketing picture.

• Television predicted to fall 7.1 percent
• Online marketing continue to swell up to 15.1 percent of all marketing by 2011
• Search will see a 20 percent increase by the end of this year compared to only 1.8 percent for classifieds

So work on your online marketing and branding. You don't want to lose on this opportunity, do you?

Advertising in social networking

35 per cent of Asian youth aged between eight and 24 used the Internet more than a year earlier and 25 per cent of them said 'they just couldn't live without the Internet'. A study, by OgilvyOne, found social networking and forums accounted for 10.2 per cent of all Internet visits by Singapore users.

Stanley Tay, GM of online marketing firm PurpleClick Media, says that there is an increase in enquiries by local firms about advertising via online media platforms, especially Facebook.

Typically, these companies were trying to reach out to younger consumers, who were likely to spend a significant amount of time on social media sites. Estimating that only one to 2 per cent of advertising spending is on digital platforms, Ken Mandel, vice-president and managing director of Yahoo! South-east Asia, "we do need to get those spends up to at least 10 per cent, which I'd say is the industry average."

The people who are currently using these social media will be our future leaders and future business decision makers, and it might be worthwhile to start investing in this audience base as early as possible.'