"Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing" (PDF)

Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing | The New Digital Marketing Landscape
• At “Pepsi Smash” on Yahoo! Music, users are offered “exclusive video content
featuring artists, their music, and their lifestyles. Keep up to date with the
Smash IMV which updates you weekly on what’s hot now!” 151
• “Max Out your chats!” urges the Yahoo! IMvironment sponsored by Kraft’s
Lunchables. “New Lunchables Lunch Combinations Maxed Out Double-Stacked
Tacos have arrived and you’re in charge of the flavor and the fun. Buzz a friend
and take your chat from Mild to Wild—no salsa necessary! Try it now.” 152
• The “M&M Always IMvironment” features the brand’s popular “spokescandies.”
“There’s a new way to add a little more M&M® to your day,” the site chirps.
“Chat with friends about life, love and chocolate with this cool IMV. There’s an M
in everyone.” 153
• The Pepsi Free Ride IMvironment comes with a free “starter code” for a chance
to win a “2007 Subaru Impreza WRX Limited Customized by DUB Magazine®
directly from your IMV!” In this manner the Pepsi IMVironment drives traffic to
the company’s Free Ride Sweepstakes website, where users can enter codes
from specially marked 20 oz. and 1 liter bottles for a chance to win the car (one
per day) or $20 for gas (one winner per minute). The sweepstakes page also
includes a gallery of user-submitted customized Imprezas, a car race-simulation
video game, and a video of the TV ad for Pepsi’s contest. 154
• The gaming service Xfire, which is owned by Viacom, has incorporated IM features
into its game to enable users to send and receive messages to each other
while they play. This addition helped boost the game’s popularity, and is particularly
appealing to Xfire’s advertisers, which include Pepsi and Taco Bell. Players
can also add branded “skins” to their games, including Taco Bell’s “El
Presidente” skin, “featuring Mountain Dew Baja Blast.” 155 According to industry
trade reports, “Xfire is adding 400 thousand new users per month, mostly in the
core male 14 to 34 demographic, and is adding two million ‘buddy’ relationships
a month.” 156
Marketers can also encourage IM users to develop ongoing relationships with
branded virtual friends, through the use of “bots” and buddy icons. 157 AOL debuted its
new upgraded version of the AIM Instant Messenger Service in 2005 by calling it “the
front door to more than 43 million Americans’ social networks.” 158 Among its features
was a souped-up flock of “bots” that “allow users to interact, play and get essential information
updates in real time.” 159 The instant messaging service has also been redesigned
to better service advertisers and marketers. “The New AIM.com and AIM Today,”
explained the company’s press release, “present marketers and advertisers with targeted
and ‘day-parted’ reach into AIM’s dynamic user base, half of which is comprised of attractive
yet hard to reach teen and young audiences.” 160
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