Thursday, February 11, 2010
Social Media ROI and the Pepsi Refresh Project
In the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, and the days following it, the ads that appeared in the game got plenty of online buzz, especially if they had social media tie-ins. But what about Pepsi, which decided to opt out of the game? Will it get better ROI from the Pepsi Refresh Project that than it would have from being on the Super Bowl telecast?
A few results are starting to come in. Clickz tallied up the number of Facebook fans that Super Bowl advertisers had before and after the game. Pepsi’s rival, Coke, which had several spots during the game, added nearly 390,000 fans to its page. Pepsi added about 300,000 fans, but it still trails Coke in total fans. Coke now has nearly 5 million, while Pepsi has around 515,000.
True, fan count isn’t a very good measure of ROI. But with all the money Pepsi reportedly is devoting to digital marketing for the Refresh Project, it had an opportunity to pull closer to Coke in the social-media wars. At least by this measure, Coke still won.
And while Pepsi has gotten plenty of PR in the marketing community for its decision to skip the Super Bowl, Coke’s in-game ads generated awareness among consumers—the people who actually buy its products.
Some think Pepsi made a mistake by not tying the Refresh Project in with a Super Bowl ad. Jeremiah Owyang, a partner in the Altimeter Group, wrote this week in Forbes: “By not having any in-game discussion on the advertisements, [Pepsi] was unable to use the Super Bowl or its advertisements as a catapult to launch the campaign into the social sphere. In fact, after the game, overall mentions of Pepsi and the Pepsi Refresh campaign remained relatively on the same trajectory as before.”
The Refresh Project is expected to last a year, so the good news is that Pepsi has plenty of time beyond the near-term buzz of the Super Bowl to generate ROI. But it will only be successful if it has clear objectives and ties its social media efforts in with its bottom-line results.
As Geoff Ramsey, eMarketer’s CEO, writes in the new Insight Brief “Seven Guidelines for Achieving ROI from Social Media,” “It is impossible for marketers to measure success if they do not know what their objectives are before they start a social media marketing initiative.” To succeed, Geoff asserts, marketers must establish clear marketing goals, organize their measurements into a logical framework and take a long-term approach.
PepsiCo’s Frank Cooper told SmartBrief on Social Media that he’s looking at three key measurements: relationships with consumers, social media activity and sales lift.
“First and foremost we’re focused on relationships. We are building more relationships and we have more points of contact with our consumers. That’s a positive thing. We can measure that. We know how many more people that we’re contacting. We can also measure the activity within the social-media space. We already see today what’s happening on Twitter. We see what’s happening on Facebook — and the response has been tremendous. And then third, I think ultimately, this whole idea of allowing people to do good through our platform, we believe will actually serve us at the shelf. I believe we will see a sales lift coming from this.”
Whether Pepsi’s Refresh Project is successful or not depends on its ability to follow through and not only measure those things but also apply them to its entire marketing plan.
“Seven Guidelines for Achieving ROI from Social Media” is part of a series of eMarketer Insight Briefs focused on social media marketing. Available exclusively to Total Access subscribers, the seven briefs, along with a PowerPoint slideshow, answer the most common and most pressing questions that businesses have about social media marketing.
Total Access subscribers, log in and view the Insight Briefs now. Learn more about an eMarketer Total Access subscription today.
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The premise of this article is that fans are a valid metric in moving the business needle, that social connections for the sake of social connections can make a difference in business performance through a promotional campaign. I challenge that. What the CEO, CMO and CFO want to know is if those social connections ever translate into brand loyalty and transactions.
Pepsi did a ton of digital display ads during the Super Bowl, and we don’t know how well they did in generating actual transactions into their offer.
Moreover, the difference between being in the bowl or out of the bowl does not really relate to social networking as such, but how mass advertising drives more connections.
One issue with SNS marketing is the pretentiousness of the notion lf “fans” and “followers”. People simply do not have the time to be constantly “in touch” with the brand from social messaging. There’s way too much noise. So the brand messaging becomes just another mass communications mechanism. We’re back to “eyeballs” and the advertising accountability dilemma.
What is needed is a shift to a true form of distributed messaging that can support natural relevant, permission-based discovery, interaction, transactions, and accountability…as opposed to assuming that Facebook and Twitter are anything more than yet another channel for pumping out offers.
http://www.memothis.com. It’s what’s next!
Agree, total fans on facebook or anything else is a poor indication of anything.
However, I think that Pepsi is taking a longer term approach to earning trust and thus developing a relationship with consumers.
Sure, Coke pumps out some ad and gets all kinds of day after chatter but how does what they did do anything to further a longer term connection between Coke and its customers… which I think is how things should be done going forward.
I use the saying that marketing is like a blanket and you need to wrap yourselves around consumers and make them comfortable.
I just think Pepsi is thinking ahead and Coke it thinking behind. And I look at social media with a cynical eye but it’s the strategy that I am talking about more than the choice of media many senses here.
LOL. We use so many nonsense words and useless metaphors to explain branding and marketing, and especially when it comes to social media experiments like the Refresh Project. Could it be possible that Pepsi couldn’t figure out how to tell its consumers anything meaningful, relevant, or useful to the base, crass, not-so-PC behaviors of BUYING and DRINKING SODA POP? Any company could give away money, and coming from a business that had revenues of $43 BILLION last year the $20 mil is chump change. It certainly qualifies the campaign as more of a cheap marketing stunt than a substantive gesture of goodwill.
Pepsi’s marketers have a responsibility to build a business, so I wonder if dabbling with the nonsense ROI and other presumptive metrics of social kwan/presence/cosmic whatever could be an abrogation of that duty?
I riffed on this topic a bit at Dim Bulb today, if you’re interested: http://bit.ly/dpgItD
good post! for more tips on social media for ecommerce i would recommend reading up http://bit.ly/aKM5NF
Thanks so much for the great responses. I’ve been out of the office on vacation so I’m just now reading these.
I do agree, Kjell and Danny (and said so in the post), that fan count is a poor indicator of overall success in social media. But with the difference between Coke’s fan count and Pepsi’s fan count so sizeable, Coke simply has a much larger base of people to communicate with in a social context. Even if many don’t respond or see what Coke posts, Coke probably has a better chance of getting interaction than Pepsi might. And Pepsi did have a chance to close the Facebook friend count gap with Coke and I think it missed an opportunity.
Jonathan, I think $20 million is a pretty big amount when it comes to big corporations and cause marketing. But whether Pepsi will sell more soda as a result of the Refresh Project remains to be seen.
I agree that fan counts should not be the only measure when considering social media ROI. Ultimately, marketers are focused on increasing sales. Given the limitations in measuring the direct impact on sales based on improved brand awareness caused by social media campaigns, I view fan counts as a viable secondary measure to understand social media effectiveness.
There was a very good article in ClickZ this week (see http://www.clickz.com/3636523) which looked at the actual direct sales data from Eletronic Arts’ recent Facebook ad campaign which promoted their new game Dante’s Inferno (which by the way was also supported by a Super Bowl campaign which led to 18,000 new fans). If I am interpreting the ClickZ article right, EA is reporting that 2% of the fans ultimately ended up directly buying their game online.
The burning question in my mind remains. What was the grand total of all new, incremental sales that EA will see as a result of its social media campaign? The tools just don’t exist for even the largest most sophisticated marketers to answer this question right now. Until someone events such as tools, we’ll be stuck using secondary measures like fan counts.
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