• by Karl Greenberg , November 7, 2012

At Ad:tech NY on Wednesday, Shiv Singh, global head of digital at PepsiCo, said the company faces a real challenge with doing real-time social at scale. "We are a massive business, with our products in 97% of American households, so for something to truly resonate it has to be very big," he said. The company has focused on Twitter to support its evolution and launch of new Pepsi global positioning around "living life for the now," establishing Twitter's largest brand partnership to date. 

"The brand relaunch is about how to live in the current of culture, how to maximize the moment," he said. "We saw Twitter as a key anchor point." He said the days of big campaigns aren't enough. "We also found that when you put conversation at the center of ads, you get big results. You can't have strong push messages on social. The brand has to be in the current of culture and conversation."

As part of the effort, Pepsi got access to Twitter data on how music is being consumed. "We have a strong heritage with music, and the more we associate with music, the more products we sell." The company created a 60-second minivideo recap of what had happened for the prior week on Twitter around music and created weekly tweet-sized, 50-second video mashups. "We've been doing that for a year. The second piece was to take a rising song and give out downloads."

Third, the company organized and ran four major Twitter live-stream concerts, which were also streamed on Pepsi.com. Not only could viewers stream the concert on the social network, they could also influence it. "So for the first time on a massive scale we were able to program without TV. Also, with advertising on Twitter, we were able to see interesting engagement rates with." He said that among music enthusiasts on Twitter, 30% of them talked about Pepsi in 2012, versus around 13% in 2011.