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.