Porter Novelli

When Mountain Dew launched the “DEWmocracy Campaign,” our challenge was to tell the complex DEWmocracy story in a dynamic, intuitive way and position the brand as a leader in social media and consumer/brand collaboration.  The “DEWmocracy Campaign” was an unprecedented, multi-tiered brand collaboration effort harnessing the “collective intelligence” and enthusiasm of Mountain Dew fans across the USA to create the next Mountain Dew flavor.

Launched in late 2007, the first DEWmocracy initiative opened product development to consumers so they could choose the next DEW flavor, color, name and packaging graphics. After receiving more than one million concepts, PepsiCo launched Voltage, a citrus-charged beverage that came to market in January 2009. DEWmocracy 2, launched in July 2009, gave Mountain Dew’s fans another outlet to express their passion for the brand and to engage with other DEW enthusiasts using social media tools. Through social media, these enthusiasts interacted with each other and were charged with “overseeing” brand development activities including selecting and naming the new product to package design, advertising and promotion.

Consumer engagement was at the heart of the DEWmocracy campaign and its success was based largely on its communal dynamics. Porter Novelli used a similar approach to reach both the media and influencer communities – recognizing their participation and sharing the DEWmocracy story with them.

The strategy mimicked the campaign’s widespread use of 360 degree communications by using a range of mediums including dedicated media and social influencer events, a one-stop online media hub, a video interview, a documentary style video recap and traditional media outreach. To kick things off, the team hosted a morning media event in a loft in New York’s Union Square for more than 200 bloggers, traditional media and social media outlets. An HTML invitation, which included embedded video, drew the crowd to the event. We hosted a second informational event in the evening, exclusively for social media influencers. The team sought to make the media hub as simple, “clean” and intuitive as possible – a significant challenge given the vast amounts of relevant information designated for inclusion (65 individual media assets). To accomplish this, the team created a home page that is visually analogous to a road map, with each of the campaign’s seven distinct stages represented as individual stops along the way.

The DEWmocracy press launch and media hub generated more than 55 million media impressions. Positive coverage appeared in top-tier outlets such as Wired, CNET and Mashable, which ran the story with the headline “Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got it Right.” In addition, the media hub beat expectations with more than 1,419 unique visitors and unique page visits totaling 5,799, exceeding the goal of at least 250 media and bloggers. The average time spent by visitors to the media hub was 250 percent more than the average time spent on websites in general.