Is it just me, or is this summer promotion from Pepsi the worst campaign ever??

It’s actually a great campaign, but with two small mistakes that make it absolutely worthless!!

Pepsi has been known to spend alot on advertising here in the GCC, and they claim to be the leading soft drink here, which is probably true seeing that its been here way before Coke.

Personally, I used to be a diet coke drinker until very recently, when I tried the new diet pepsi (with the light blue can), and now it is my soft drink of choice. So when I went to buy some pepsi a couple of weeks ago, I saw this new summer promotion, where they give out the following prizes -

  • Every day ¡V A fabulous Chrysler Crossfire worth SR 170,000
  • Every 3 hours- PlayStation 2 Satin Silver and GT4 game tape.
  • Every hour- iPod Shuffle mp3 player.
  • Every two minutes- Sawa phone card.
  • Various mobile ring tones from Mazzika Music Channel.

So far so good, right?? No wait it gets better….they actually have some decent celebrities promoting the campaign!

In addition to the famous stars such as Roberto Carlos, Ronaldinho, and so on, they actually added a few local celebrities, and I personally think they really know how to pick their people. For example, in Kuwait, the poster for the promotion has a picture of Roberto Carlos, Bader Al-Mutawa, and Ahmed Hussain. I think those two are probably the best two celebrities to be used as brands, which is a rare thing in Kuwait. Bader Al-Mutawa is a clean cut handsome football player with some skills. Ahmed Hussain is also a good looking guy with a great voice, and a decent personality. More importantly, those two guys are a rare breed of celebrity here that could influence both males and females. For example, if they picked Bashar Abdulla and Bashar AlShatti, it wouldnt have the same effect! Guys may like the idea of Bashar Abdulla but there’s not much to attract females in him, on the other hand, Bashar AlShatti might attract alot more females than males even though apparently he is a very nice guy. Anyway thats not the subject, this whole branding people thing needs a seperate post someday. Back to the Pepsi campaign….

In Saudi they use Yaser Al-Qahtani and Hisham from star academy. So basically its a very localized campaign which is brilliant!

So, they have good prizes that appeal to youth, as well as the right celebrities that appeal to youth. So why is Q saying its the worst campaign ever?!

Pepsi supposedly spent $4 million on this campaign, which is a high figure and shows that they really want to promote this. Also, if you see the local co-ops, they took ALOT of space, with some of them having the prize car on display inside the jam3iya. Also the ads are everywhere on the streets and also on TV. All this is great….but, two MAJOR problems.

  1. No online support to the campaign! If they are trying so hard to catch the youth, and the prizes are ‘hip’ like the iPod and so on, how come they don’t use the internet to support their campaign?? You know what’s worse? They don’t even mention the campaign in the regional website!!! PepsiArabia does not mention the campaign in any form, and they have no information or even a picture of the people they signed to promote this campaign, such as all the regional football stars or singers!!
  2. OK, number 1 isn’t enough to make it the worst campaign, I know. But this reason is enough. Ok….brace yourself….they don’t tell you how you can win or how to participate!!! The instructions on this are extremely vague! So far what I gathered is that the way to win any prize is to send an SMS with the number found under the cap. I have been trying to figure out what to do with that number for weeks now! Do I send an SMS to that number?! Or do I send that number to another number which they haven’t told anyone about?!? Let’s say I send a message to the number under the cap, should i leave the message blank? If I do send a message to that number, does that mean that every can has a different number and that they actually registered all these numbers?! That doesnt make sense. So I think I have to send the number to another number, but WHERE?!? Nothing on the can says it, nothing on any of the posters says it, and obviously the website has nothing to do with the campaign, so basically all this money spent….on nothing! Maybe its just Kuwait that they neglected to give a number for, who knows?!

Also, I should mention that this promotion is scheduled for 60 days only, from mid-June to mid-August, which means there is less than 3 weeks remaining out of the 8 weeks. So even trying to fix that by now is useless!

Seriously, how can a company like Pepsi neglect something so obvious as that?!

If the number is there and I missed it, it still is a crap campaign because I shouldnt even be looking for it in the first place!