In a 30-day sprint, we developed a rapid cadence of the kind of image-based branded content that had already made the brand an engagement leader. Our content was relevant and tapped into the cultural interests of our fans. We threw out polished images and traded them in for social quality photos. We optimized, listened, and geotargeted appropriately. What would friends be posting? The eclipse? Shark Week? We were on it.

Working with Facebook and our media partner, we used real-time media to build scale and reach. Once published, we monitored each piece of content’s Facebook virality rate. When it hit a predetermined threshold, indicating audience affinity, we bought newsfeed ads to push the content into more newsfeeds, increasing reach and earning more virality. This highly efficient method improved Pepsi’s overall edgerank score, allowing us to successfully reach a much higher number of people with all Facebook posts, media-driven or not.

During the 30 days, we created revolutionary results with a very modest budget, creating a new model of efficiently building reach. During the sprint, Pepsi saw on Facebook:

-6x the engagement rates of our competitor.

-A 114% jump in average post engagement.

-179% boost in "People Talking About" on Pepsi’s Facebook page.

-A 1133% jump in Viral Reach.

-250,000 new fans without a dedicated acquisition campaign.

-46 million unique users reached.

While these numbers were great, the resulting sales were even better. This campaign resulted in directly attributable triple-digit ROI based on incremental sales, as measured in a third-party study.