PepsiCo and Twitter today announced a global music partnership, boosting Pepsi's music-based "Live for Now" marketing platform with Twitter campaigns to drive awareness and traffic to Pepsi's Live for Now music ambassadors such as Katy Perry.
The year-long deal between PepsiCo and Twitter includes a weekly music-oriented video series (watch episode one above) offering an overview of the artists (such as Katy Perry), music and music news trending that week on Twitter. Also on offer: Free music downloads (starting at 1pm ET today), plus weekly tweets from @pepsi about current music and free downloads from the Amazon.com MP3 Store to consumers who follow @pepsi and include the hashtag #PepsiMusicNOW.
The partnership will also help spread the word about Pepsi's pop-up U.S. concert series this summer and fall. They will be announced first on Twitter and streamed live through Pepsi’s Twitter page and on PepsiPulse.com to fans everywhere.
"The Pepsi partnership with Twitter is awesome on so many levels," stated Brad Jakeman, president, Global Beverage Group, PepsiCo. “Twitter is the quintessential 'now-time' media, which is a natural fit with our "Live for Now" global campaign. Combine that with Pepsi's long association with music and the result makes for a cool and innovative experience for music fans everywhere."
"Live for Now Music" was created by Twitter’s brand-strategy group, run by Joel Lunenfeld, formerly Moxie Interactive CEO. The first program from the group was the AmEx Twitter Sync Campaign, launched at South by Southwest Interactive.
"This is the biggest initiative a marketer has done with Twitter to date," commented Adam Bain, Twitter's president-global revenue, to Ad Age. "It ranks as one of the smartest campaigns we've seen on the platform too.”
"We'd like to do more deals like this. ... Any opportunity to get strategic with a marketer and agency is rare," adds Bain.
PepsiCo has been striving to boost its flagship Pepsi brand which dropped to third place among U.S. soft-drink brands in 2010 behind Coke and Diet Coke.
Beleaguered CEO Indra Nooyi, has been transforming PepsiCo from "a North American fun-for-you company" into a global enterprise with a product line that can prosper in a world where obesity is fast becoming the No. 1 health problem,” as Fortune's current issue notes.
Nooyi defends her strategy as "performing while transforming." In addition to poor market performance for key brands Pepsi and Doritos, “innovation has been weak; the company has introduced flavor tweaks such as Cherry Vanilla Pepsi, for example, but nothing to match Coke's hugely successful Coke Zero and attention-grabbing bottle and can designs,” writes Fortune.
“Basic execution — getting the right products into the right stores in the right quantities all the time — has been subpar; the company has had trouble holding its share of retailers' floor space. Overhead has ballooned, leaving the company less efficient and productive than it needs to be.”
Nooyi joined PepsiCo in 1994 as chief strategist, and as CEO, has worked to leverage two major trends, globalization and the worldwide rise of diabetes and coronary artery disease, attributable in part to what people consume.
PepsiCo and its CEO are in a race against time to see if and when changes put in place under her tenure will pay off. "Courage in leadership is very difficult, especially in today's world, where the media doesn't take the time to really understand you," Nooyi tells Fortune. "And so … when people write all the crap that they do, just … get stoic about it."
In short, like her brand, Nooyi wants to "Live for Now" while inspiring — and creating — the future.
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