Pepsi
A logo at a concert is not a memory. Pepsi was sponsoring Turkey's music scene and reporting the result in eyeballs. The brief was to build a youth-focused strategy for the music sponsorships, then audit whether the money was buying engagement or just presence.
The category context made it urgent. In carbonated soft drinks the liquid does not do the persuading, brand affinity does. Pepsi held around 7 percent of Turkey's soft drinks market in 2010, running second to Coca-Cola. The target was the 8.5 million people aged 18 to 24 in a country with a median age of 29.8, spending an average of 53 minutes a day on social networks, in a market with 31 million Facebook users and Twitter only just launched in Turkish.
What Pepsi had at the events was banners, stage branding and product at the vendor stalls. Standard packaging, and structurally unable to do the job. Attendees walked past the signage the way they walk past exit signs. Success was reported in estimated eyeballs, which counts who was physically present and says nothing about who linked the night to the brand afterwards. Coca-Cola had already solved this with deep integration at Rock'n Coke. And this audience processed brand presence socially, so an activation that gave them nothing to post produced nothing at all.
Deliverables
Youth strategy
On-site activation
Influencer programme
Digital amplification
Engagement and spend audit
Date
2011
Client
PepsiCo
Industry
Beverages
Sponsorship rebuilt as something people take part in, with a measurement frame around it that tracks engagement instead of presence.
The fieldwork. Four sponsored concerts and two festival stages were audited alongside 260 exit interviews. Five patterns held across every event.
The strategy. Three channels, one test: every activation had to create a moment people would photograph, share, or talk about afterwards.
Static branding became moments people chose to enter, photograph, and carry into the next day.
Most attendees posted during the event, yet few named a sponsor. Free product created transactions, not recall; the strongest opportunities appeared between performances.
The plan replaced static presence with a photo installation, a between-set lounge, live crowd content, peer influencers, and a timed post-event sequence.
The audit. Tracking shifted from impressions to engagement, social amplification, recall, and spend—lifting participation while redirecting budget into experiences.
Social footprint rose seventeen times, from around 120 to around 2,100 mentions per event, made up of attendees sharing moments that happened to include the brand. Recall at 72 hours went from 11 to 29 percent, nearly tripled, because the live, 24-hour, 48-hour and 72-hour sequence closed the decay window that had been draining every previous sponsorship. Fifteen people produced around 340 thousand impressions per event for less than a single traditional media buy, and the 48-hour repurposing fed owned channels for two weeks after each event.
Most of all, presence became something that could be priced. Interaction-based reporting let Pepsi Türkiye compare sponsorship value across events, venues and formats, and answer which event earned the most brand engagement for the money.
PepsiCo
Music events marketing, 2011