The Rocket Blog

The Times, They are a Changing

Pepsi Passes on Super Bowl Ad & Goes For Social Media

The highly coveted and massively expensive Super Bowl spots will be missing a staple in the lineup this year.  Sure the spots cost between $2.5 and $6 million, but hey they are Pepsi, right?  Well Pepsi decided to skip the Super Bowl ad this year, after advertising for 23 consecutive years, and go in a different direction.  Social media.  

Pepsi decided to give away $20 million in grant money to projects voted for on their website, refresheverything.com.  Instead of pumping more money into mass media with the 100 million+ viewers on Super Bowl Sunday, they turned the marketing for their new venture to the Internet.  Their reasoning? Super Bowl ads are very extravagant and when you are advertising for a campaign awarding grants to worthy causes it seems to be a contradiction.  Giving away $20 million and then spending $12 million to advertise for it is somewhat of a contradiction, Lee Clow, chief creative officer and global director of media arts at TBWA Worldwide, the agency that created Pepsi's campaign says.

This is a huge testimony for social media over mass media, but in no way does this mean Super Bowl ads are becoming a thing of the past.  CBS sold out those ads, calling the 2010 ads their biggest effort in advertising yet.  

To read more about Pepsi’s absence from the Super Bowl check out the article on Yahoo.

*This is the closest thing we have to letting Rachel write about sports. 

The incredible shrinking Steve Jobs

We're onto you Apple

Nice try, Apple, but we are not fooled but this iPad business.  You say it is larger than an iPhone, but smaller than than a laptop. Yea, right.  You have clearly found a way to shrink Apple’s Brain, Steve Jobs, just so the tablet... err iPad, looks like a different product than the iPhone.  For once, the onion might have actually gotten it right.  If it wasn’t ready you could have just said so. Honey I shrunk the CEO is so 90's.

What we can’t wrap our brains around is why did you eventually shrink him to 1/100th of his size.  A two-story tablet is really not that appealing to the average tech-consumer.  All we have to ask is, please don’t turn Steve into an ant.  We need his brain power for years to come. (At least Reuben does.)

Why Google Xistence Might Not be a Horrible Idea

Let’s update our twitter, facebook, youtube, linked in, and blog with what you had for lunch. By the time you are done doing this you are horribly late for your afternoon meeting, so... it’s time to update again.  Dang, this personal social media stuff is taking up a lot of time.  Well, a parody released this week brings up a good point.  Why not put your status updates on auto-pilot and live your life, already?  

Updating your personal social media pages is really just a way to get across a persona you want people to relate you to.  If you want to be considered a sports know-it-all, you will spend your time tweeting and updating about the newest in sports news.  Xistence claimed to have a way for you to plug in a persona, and it would tweet and update in that same way.  And to make things even better, you could receive emails briefing you on what “you” (really Xistence) said you did this week.  How insane is that? But also, how much time would that save you?

Before it was known as a fake, people were buzzing about the insanity and possible practicality of Google Xistence.  Do we spend too much time creating personas online instead of actually living in reality? Maybe.  Is Google Xistence a completely out-of-line idea? Maybe not.