Suicide Watch: Major Brand Determined to Off Itself

Pepsi's brand team evaluating the Pepsi Refresh campaign results

Credit & Copyright: Tony Rowell

In its quest to help boost Coke’s sales, Pepsi is embarking on another self-immolating social media venture.  Rising from the ashes of Pepsi Refresh comes a global campaign called Live for Now.  It plans to riff on the lyrics of Nicki Minaj’s song, Moments 4 Life, and update its Pepsi Pulse platform (a platform or scaffold?) to create an entertainment ‘dashboard of pop culture’ ranking tweets, pictures and news items from the world of entertainment by popularity.

People (Pepsi calls them consumers, but I highly doubt that) are then encouraged (bribed) to tweet “likes” and pin crap from the dashboard, as well as respond to celebrity challenges (Bono wants you to send him money).   It’s all about taking online conversations and doing something or other with them…. I’m not sure what and I don’t Pepsi does either.  Just for the record, the last time Pepsi did this kind of thing its sales dropped 5% and it fell to third place in overall soft drink sales. 

The kicker for me is what Brad Jakeman, president-global enjoyment and chief creative officer, said about the project.  While he wants the campaign idea and brand positioning to be consistent around the world, he’s not overly concerned about the need to run identical ads: The identical piece of advertising running everywhere, that's an old-fashioned way of global marketing. In global brand management, you get stars for efficacy, not consistency. I'm not going to comb the world checking to make sure everyone is using identical pieces of advertising.  Really?  The Old Timey global consistency of image and brand assets is not important?  Good luck with that Brad.  Write when you get work. 

The Ad Contrarian, the brilliant Bob Hoffman, has been hammering away with great delight at Pepsi’s screw-ups for a few years now (search "Pepsi" on his site for all the hilarity), and when Pepsi Refresh crashed and burned last year, he predicted what it would do next:

Concept: Happy, youthful people of every color from all over the global world are drinking Pepsi while the most expensive pop stars of every color in the global world are singing about Pepsi. This will all be tied into a mobile Facebook/Twitter/YouTube friend and download fest and will culminate in a worldwide pop concert streamed live all over the global, mobile world. The campaign theme will be "Planet Pepsi" or something else of equal globularity.

Pretty damn close, Bob.  Pretty damn close. 

Seriously, Joan Crawford needs to rise from the dead brandishing a huge cast-iron coat hanger and beat some sense into these guys.  Here's how she handled the Pepsi Board of Directors—she makes Steve Jobs look like Mr Rodgers.