Pepsi Refresh Project: 2011 IMA Award Winner

CATEGORY: Best Mobile Marketing Campaign: SMS
AGENCY: GMR Marketing
CLIENT: PepsiCo

In 2010, Pepsi decided to forgo advertising in the Super Bowl and instead take its $20 million budget and give it away—literally—through its newly launched Pepsi Refresh Project. Through the project, individuals and groups offered proposals for positive change in four categories: Education, Communities, Arts & Music and Challenge (a wild card group). Monthly winners, chosen by consumers voting online at www.refresheverything.com, received grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000 for their projects.

To date, the Pepsi Refresh Project has given away tens of millions of dollars to fund “refreshing” ideas. More than 1,000 ideas in 345 cities and 45 states have received grants and impacted 1.2 million lives, according to Pepsi.

The program began online, but GMR Marketing was given the task of developing a mobile strategy to broaden the promotion. A mobile voting program was designed that included SMS and iPhone and Android apps that fed into a mobile website.

Now, nearly 1 million SMS votes are being cast per month, accounting for about 15% of total votes. Each mobile user casts an average of 5.2 votes.

“The mobile piece provided more engagement and more time spent on our website,” says Andrea Canabal, communications manager for Pepsi. “We are definitely pleased with the engagement results overall and with how much it has grown. People are continually coming back to the site via their mobile devices and spending more time on it.”

“We found that a lot more consumers are engaging with the project’s brands while they’re out living their lives,” adds Bryan Rasch, senior vice president, digital and mobile solutions, GMR Marketing. “That, in turn, gives us an opportunity to engage consumers out there as well—and I think that’s where the big opportunity was with this idea.”

Texting also provided the ability for people soliciting votes to spread the word about their ideas. For instance, says Rasch, “people wanting votes for their program would put their text code on the side of their car or something and then take a photo of it and put it up on their social network.”
The program’s strength is its integration between the website and mobile components. “From handset to website to SMS, they get a consistent engagement with Pepsi, which is a testament to the brand. That, I think, was our biggest success,” Rasch says.