SodaBowl – Pepsi vs. Coke

Several months ago Pepsi made a decision to completely replace their traditional Superbowl advertising with social media efforts. In late January, Coca Cola has jumped on the social media bandwagon, and announced that it will be doing a Facebook campaign during the Superbowl. So how did the blogosphere and the Twittersphere  react to these announcements? And did the “tweeps” side more with Pepsi, because of its brave foray into social media at the expense of a more traditional advertising strategy. If this happened several years ago, we would’ve all thought Pepsi was crazy for pulling its Superbowl ads. After all, it was assumed that a large brand that had the funds to support a Superbowl ad placement, would never pass up such an opportunity. Because how else would you be able to reach millions of people? Enter year 2010, the golden age of social media.

So how did the two brands fare against each other in sentiment and share of voice? I built a couple of reports using the Biz360 Community tool, based on a combination of keywords dealing with Coke, Pepsi, and Superbowl ads. Looking at share of voice for the past 90 days, you can see that Pepsi has a considerably larger “piece of the pie” than Coke.

However, if you look at the last two weeks, the gap has narrowed somewhat, which makes me think that Coke’s social media announcement had something to do with that.

Looking at sentiment, both brands have garnered a fairly positive sentiment, but then again, these are Coke and Pepsi, the all-American “Brands Next Door”. Looking at how sentiment evolved over time, it’s interesting to point out that both Coke and Pepsi had a spike in positive sentiment on January 28th, the day that Facebook announced its social media campaign during Superbowl. However, Coke had very little positive activity before that (see below), whereas Pepsi (2nd chart below) had some significant spikes throughout the month.

So I built a sentiment trendline for Pepsi going 90 days back, and this is what I saw (see below). Indeed, Pepsi has been experiencing a positive lift ever since the announcement came out at the end of December.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 4:17 pm and is filed under trend report. You can follow any coments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a coment, or trackback from your own site.