Why Is Pepsi Paying for Web Radio, Twitter and Facebook?
by Peter Kafka
Posted on March 15, 2009 at 10:10 AM PT
Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are entertaining diversions for marketers, but with the economy in the gutter, serious companies have to stop playing and get back to the business at hand: Selling more stuff.
Right? No, says Bonin Bough.
Admittedly, Bough has a bias here, since he gets paid by a big company–PepsiCo (PEP)–to oversee its digital and social media. But for the time being, at least, Pepsi is still letting Bough spend time and money on newfangled outlets, even though it’s not exactly clear how the company is going to able to use them to sell more soda.
Example for the day: Pepsi’s sponsorship of BlogTalkRadio, an Internet radio start-up that is Webcasting from South by Southwest this week (Pepsi is also sponsoring SXSW in general). Like lots of other Web media, radio/streaming audio is challenging for marketers to get their heads around since the traditional metrics they use to measure their campaigns don’t really exist. But Bough says his company is willing to experiment anyway.
Bough and I talked about Web radio, video, and Twitter yesterday (note to Twitter guys–the “authentication/verification” strategy some of you are talking about doesn’t seem that appealing to Pepsi) on BlogTalkRadio. I’ve embedded the conversation below. Apologies for meandering, amateurish aspects of the chat, which are entirely my fault. Talking on the radio, it turns out, is really hard.
Comments
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Posted by Matt Riker at March 16th, 2009 at 1:11 am