Creating a "buzz" can be a good thing.
And a look at a recent PepsiCo Inc. promotion, recorded on Yahoo! Inc.'s "Buzz Index," showed just what "buzz" can do for building brand and generating sales, Murray Gaylord, vice president of marketing for Yahoo!, said yesterday during the opening session at the Direct Marketing Association’s net.marketing Conference & Exhibition.
In 1996, Pepsi launched Pepsi Stuff, a promotion where drinkers used codes in bottle caps to earn points to buy merchandise. The program was squashed in 1997 because of its high costs and lack of return on investment. (Pepsi was sending out 16 million, four-color, 12-page catalogs featuring the "stuff" participants could buy with their points).
But in realizing the program had merit, Pepsi engaged Yahoo! last year to transform the offline loyalty program online. A Web site was built--pepsistuff.com--users registered online, gave their permission to receive correspondence and used their points to shop, Gaylord said.
The promotion, which ended in December, was layered with a multi-channel advertising campaign that included banner ads on Yahoo!, point-of-sale materials and television commercials.
The results?
One million unique visitors in the first 30 days. More than three million users during the 120 days the promotion ran with 68% of the respondents meeting Pepsi's core target audience, people age 13 to 34. A 5% lift in volume versus the previous year was also recorded as was an upturn in branding, Gaylord said.
Because of the buzz around the promotion, Yahoo!'s Buzz Index showed a large sustained lift in interest in Pepsi that lasted for months. The index tracks product interest by measuring 40 categories in user engagement with brands, products, people, technologies and broad concepts.
Gaylord also said that, while the Internet as a marketing tool has been over hyped as a vehicle that can do anything, it is the medium's ability to track behavior that it the "magic bullet."
He also cited the following statistics related to Internet marketing:
* It took the Internet seven years to reach a quarter of the U.S. population compared to 55 years for the automobile.
* The Internet's share of media minutes is 12% compared to 5% for newspapers, 4% for magazines, 30% for radio and 50% for TV.
* Commercial e-mail spending will grow from 164 million in 1999 to 7.3 billion in 2005.
Gaylord was called upon to step in at the last minute for scheduled keynote speaker Greg Hawkins, CEO of Buy.com, who had resigned his position two weeks ago.
