Pepsi's bold experiment with social marketing

This year, instead of spending $20 million on SuperBowl ads, Pepsi decided to put the money into Pepsi Refresh, a social marketing campaign which solicits the best ideas from consumers and plans to dole out $20 million in grants to good causes and “great ideas” throughout the year. The site opened up about 10 hours ago to take ideas from people applying for grants. On February 1, voting will begin to determine the best ideas, which will receive grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000 each.

The Pepsi Refresh site is similar in functionality to other crowdsourced idea generating efforts such as Dell’s IdeaStorm (which is run on top of Salesforce.com) and the type of sites created by UserVoice, although it is not clear who created the site on behalf of Pepsi. I have contacted Pepsi to find out and will update if I hear back from them.

Regardless, this is not a good way to launch a massive social marketing campaign aimed at fostering warm-and-fuzzy feelings towards Pepsi. Hopefully, it can fix things quickly and recover because it’s actually a pretty good idea if Pepsi can get past the technical and privacy snafus.