• by John Capone , February 5, 2010

The real game out there will not be played on Sunday night in Miami or even on television sets across the world as beer companies, carmakers, movie studios, soft drinks and dot.coms duke it out in between Manning screens and Brees bombs. The real fun, as every media junkie knows, starts Monday morning with the press pundits obsessively ranking and rating the ads in the same way that sports talk radio hums with the disgruntled armchair QB calling into question the coaches' every sneeze.

CBS hauled in $2.5 to 2.8 million per 30-second spot, with some prime real estate going for as much as $3 million. But Pepsi has stolen the spotlight up until now by having the temerity to sit on the sidelines.

Nielsen found that Pepsi was the second-most-talked-about brand online related to the Super Bowl over the months of December and January. Pepsi's Buzz Volume was 21.6%, according to Nielsen data -- meaning 21.6% of all online messages (including Twitter, online communities/ message boards, and blogs) linking a brand with the Super Bowl make reference to the Pepsi brand. But will the effort lose its fizz after the big game? Come Monday morning, will Pepsi be lost in the flood of people going gaga over Betty White getting sacked and Dockers ads where people aren't wearing any pants?

Andrew Katz, senior marketing manager for Pepsi, spoke in the midst of Social Media Week in NYC at a SoundCrtl panel, ostensibly to discuss "Social Media Music Currency" -- but could not help talking about the Pepsi Refresh Project, one of the more exciting social media efforts to come out of a major brand, in which the company is offering millions in grant money to good ideas. It has nothing to do with music, but who could blame him? The moderator duly noted that Katz is the man sitting on top of a $20-million check, prompting fellow panelist Questlove (from the Roots) to put his arm around the man from the brand.

In this way, Pepsi is throwing big money at social media. After the launch, it's looking like money well spent. But it was no sure thing. First off, there likely isn't a major agency in existence that would tell its perennial Super Bowl advertiser not to buy a Super Bowl ad. "They were worried" admits Gene Liebel, partner and director of user experience at Huge, which designed and runs the RefreshEverything platform. "It's a risky platform. It gives users a lot of control."

Building from the original brand message launched by Chiat/Day last year -- "Every Generation Refreshes the World" -- the RefreshEverything concept makes the idea concrete, with Pepsi playing the corporate benefactor. "There was not a lot of substance behind it last year," Katz tells Online Media Daily. "That was a great way to talk about the moment, with everything that was happening in the country, the [Obama] election, and our overall optimism as a brand, but we realized we needed to give it some real meaning."

This December -- using out-of-home, a page in USA Today, and some digital media -- Pepsi announced the project with "really minimal media" says Katz, and launched the site RefreshEverything.com, which was built by Brooklyn-based Huge.

"Our media budget is still sizable," Katz says. "But what we've done is, we've literally taken dollars from our marketing budget and put it into this project. Which, for us, is a seismic shift in how we market."

On January 13 the Pepsi Refresh Project opened for business (as a slew of media stories appeared touting Pepsi's decision to forgo a Super Bowl presence). "Within 72 hours, without any mass media, or broadcast media at all, we closed submissions for the first round," says Katz. "What it's meant to signal is a fundamental shift with how we are communicating and engaging with consumers."

RefreshEverything continued to roll, picking up momentum as it went along. Month two launched with paid spokespeople Demi Moore and Kevin Bacon making video appeals for their own ideas on the Facebook page. Submissions for Round Two closed in 16 hours. Expect round three to go faster than tickets for Jay-Z at the Garden.

But in keeping with the Super Bowl move, the initiative is designed to be a sustained effort of "12 months and not just one day," says Katz. Harking back to the days of Max Headroom's New Coke spots, Huge's Liebel, says, in essence: don't say the C-word. "Because we're so adverse [digitally] to things that most of the communications industry calls campaigns -- that's become a bad word for us."

Of course, in the traditional advertising word, campaign can be long-lived, "but online campaign usually means a microsite -- kind of a cool thing that's sort of a counterpart to an above-the-line initiative that really doesn't have any utility to someone using the Internet and often doesn't last very long."

So if RefreshEverything is not a campaign, what is it? "We use the word platform. I'd call it a long-term engagement platform. It adds value and has utility, where people will come back to it and use it a lot."

Liebel cites successful Web properties, not marketing efforts, as the model. "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. Which is the exact opposite of a static, locked Flash campaign, which comes out once -- it makes a big bang, and the agency goes away, and it sits there and no one really watches how things are interacted with, or tries to improve it."

Of the big splash Super Bowl ads make, Katz says, "everybody forgets about it a week later. How do we engage people as opposed to just talking to them?" The conversation starts with Pepsi asking for people to generate ideas and promote them to friends, continues as the community votes and comments on the ideas, and follows through the awarding of the money and the stories of the funded ideas going out into the real world. "Once the grants get awarded," says Katz, "it's really about telling the stories of the people who are doing these great things."

"As a concept, it does have legs, and potentially a significant life beyond Sunday," offers Rita Rodriguez, CEO of brand consultancy and agency Imagination the Americas. "It's a well-thought out strategic platform that taps into the spirit of community. In this climate, the responsibility message resonates."

Steve Farella, cofounder, chairman and CEO of total communications agency TargetCast tcm, admires the Refresh Project and says he doesn't think it will be old news either once the initial rush dies down. If played right, "they can double, triple, or quadruple the reach of Super Bowl Monday," he says.

Which, of course, is the plan. "We're obsessed with having analytics set up right from the beginning to see what's happening and testing things early, and doing rapid prototyping. It's not that the first release is flawed in any way -- actually it's been amazing; personally I can't even believe it how well it's going -- but anything that's thriving and is alive with people, you can always iterate it and make it better ... 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," Liebel says.

"So much of it is happening in Facebook," Liebel explains. "So that's just spreading through to people's social graphs right now like crazy -- I was watching it this morning in analytics. That has a long way to go before it peaks."

So, is this the way forward for Pepsi? Is out of the Super Bowl from now on? "Hard to say," answers Katz. "We've been a long-time Super Bowl advertiser, and when our strategy called for it we leveraged that platform, but this year we've definitely taken a different approach. We just have to wait and see how the campaign unfolds. It's very early on, but this is meant to be a movement and not just a moment in time."