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.

Giving away free airtime credits and mobile games were not enough to motivate housewives to participate in a promotion. We had to surprise them and motivate for repeated participations.We picked Seda Sayan (the Oprah Winfrey of Turkey) as the spokesperson of the campaign and used her voice to surprise our target. Each time a housewife text a unique code, she received a different interactive voice response (IVR) call from the Turkish Oprah! Housewives were thrilled to hear Seda’s voice every time they participated in the promotion. This way a genuine word-of-mouth was created.A ring-back tone (RBT) announcing the promotion was also assigned to each participant’s phone when they text a code. To make it more customised, IVRs and RBTs changed continuously according to weather or time of the day.Customised IVR calls and promotional RBTs were used for the first time in a mobile promotion in Turkey and received record level consumer response.

At a time of economic crisis, Pepsi started its 2009 summer campaign aiming to grow its multi-serve sales and increase market share.

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. Free airtime units and daily cash prizes were appealing for the families in financial difficulties.However, there was a bigger challenge this time! Housewives were using mobile phones but they were not used to text-and-win promotions as young people.

Therefore, we decided to engage housewives in such a way that would encourage them to participate in a mobile promotion. This way we could make them participate in the promotion not only once, but several times. We wanted to make our message travel virally among the housewives.