Marketing time cycles have to come down from nine months to nine minutes and further down to nine seconds, says Mr Shiv Singh, Global Head of Digital, PepsiCo.
His vision for realtime marketing shared at Adtech, the premier event for digital marketers, held in Gurgaon was how to condense this time cycle.
"Imagine you are on 5th Avenue on Manhattan and see Lady Gaga sipping a Pepsi walking. You quickly take a video shot of her sipping the beverage, post it to your realtime content studio who create a mash up and post it on Lady Gaga’s fan page. Within minutes you have told 40 million Lady Gaga fans that she is sipping the drink, and those near 5th Avenue can even go down to see her," he suggests.
"But no marketing organisation is currently set up to do this, he rues. “Realtime marketing means we have to change soul up, start from scratch, and go from insight to execution in all of nine seconds,” he says.
For this, he says you need to set up realtime content studios, where content is co-created.
You also need to be equipped to gather responses, aggregate them and create buzz around them, he said. An example of how PepsiCo has done this – he described how the company gathered tweets and realtime responses to the show X Factor (which it had sponsored) and based on that created conversations such as “2,600 people have a crush on Joel".
Getting more fizz out of Celebrities
Mr Singh described how soon after the television campaign with Snoop Dogg, PepsiCo tracked the artiste’s fan page, and saw how many likes had been added. “We tracked whether he was getting more Pepsi fans or we were getting more Snoop Dogg fans. So we could track our whole celebrity endorsement through the social media lens,” he said,
His piece of gyaan to the digital marketers gathered at the hall – one has to gather realtime insights, responses, create real time content studios, co-create content, manage distribution and engagement all in a matter of minutes.
In the world of connectedness, you need observers, sponsors, curators, creators, he added.
The social TV phenomena is the future, he said. “It couldn’t be bigger than anything else,” he said. Other big trends are hyper location based marketing. “This is going to play a bigger role. The third thing is how different pieces of data are being linked together in realtime.
Tweetometer : All fizz and no buzz, grumbled some of the twitterati attending the session, even as others liked the mobile marketing mantra of the PepsiCo marketer.
“PepsiCo works with budgets running into millions of dollars – all very well for them to execute some of the digital marketing campaigns mentioned by Shiv, but with our Rs 1 crore annual budget how do we do these things,” another tweeter pointed out.