Giving away free airtime credits was not enough to motivate housewives to participate in the promotion. We had to surprise them and motivate for repeated participations.We picked Seda Sayan (Oprah Winfrey of Turkey) as the spokesperson and used her voice to surprise our target. Each time a housewife texted a unique code, she received a different IVR call from Seda. Housewives were shocked to hear Seda on the phone every time they participated. A ring-back-tone (RBT) announcing the promotion was also assigned to each participant’s phone. IVRs and RBTs changed everyday which helped to spread the word virally on mobile.

During the economic crisis, when consumption shifted to multi-serves, Pepsi wanted to increase sales through a promotion. Although Pepsi had targeted young people in the previous campaigns, this time the focus was on the primary shopper: Housewives who prefer bigger sizes for the family.However, there was a bigger challenge this time as housewives were not used to text-and-win promotions like the young people.Therefore we decided to engage housewives in such a way that would encourage them to participate in the mobile promotion not only once, but several times. We had to make our message travel virally among the target.

The new mobile campaign outperformed all previous Pepsi promotions:Pepsi received 16.2 million SMS in 12 weeks.On average over 200 thousand people participated everyday.3.2million unique consumers participated, doubling previous promotions.80% of all participants were first-timers, who haven’t joined any previous Pepsi promotions.For the first time, 63% of the participations came from family size products.Ring-back-tone was listened to 21 million times!Campaign achieved overall 5% increase in market share and received 2 MMA Global Awards for Mobile Innovation / Creativity.

Previous Pepsi promotions with free airtime credits targeted young people and succeeded. However this time the target was housewives and they were reluctant to texting codes and participating to mobile promotions.To convince them to participate, Oprah Winfrey of Turkey was selected as the spokesperson. We recorded several IVR calls with Seda, so that each time a housewife sent a code, she got thrilled of receiving a call from Seda. Repeated participations were reinforced with more customized IVR calls and mobile games.A ring-back-tone announcing the promotion was also assigned to each participant’s phone, spreading the word virally on mobile.