A Conversation with Pepsico’s Shiv Singh – HuffPost 8.3.12
Mike Ragogna: Shiv, you’re the global head of digital for Pepsico. Can you tell me what that involves?
Shiv Singh: I’m responsible for digital marketing of Pepsico bevarages. I have strategic global responsibility, which is our global digital strategy, and then operational US responsibility, and this includes everything across a digital media, web experiences and social media and the tools included for us, mobile and tablet experiences.
MR: The Pepsico Billboard Summer Beats Concert Series kicked off with Katy Perry, and now we have a continuation of the series with a concert here in Nashville featuring Glorianna, Randy Houser, Jerrod Neimann, Jada, and Easton Corbin. How did this particular concert come about?
SS: This began through a deep partnership that we established with Twitter, originally. It’s Twitter’s biggest brand partnership, to date and it’s all about bringing music experiences to our consumers around the country. It has three programs: We publish trending videos every week, we give away music downloads by a Twitter account, and we livestream and bought estate in these Twitter-enabled Pepsi Summer Beach concerts. With this particular one in Nashville, we have a very large base of consumers who are interested in country music and in bands like Gloriana, so it just made perfect sense to partner with Gloriana to do this, to livestream it on Twitter and on Pepsi.com and do it in a way so that not only the people who are at the physical concert but literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world and especially across America can participate in the concert by watching it on our Pepsi website, by influencing the production on Twitter, et cetera.
MR: And I believe that this is one of the first times Twitter is delivering live performances, right?
SS: Yes. I mean, the first time was with Katy Perry, but the first time was with us, yes.
MR: So this series represents the first time that Twitter has done simultaneous broadcasting.
SS: Correct.
MR: I also wanted to ask you about other facets of this particular Summer Beats Concert Series installment. There are a couple of unique things going on, for instance, fans will be able to Twitter-in questions to their favorite artist when they’re performing?
SS: That’s right. Fans can tweet questions using #SummerBeats and if they’re lucky, the artist will answer them during a special video. There’s been a ticket giveaway challenge via Twitter itself to get free tickets to the concert, and there’s what we call Twitterstakes, a Twitter Sweepstakes to receive a signed copy of Gloriana’s new album. All of these pieces come together and it’s all anchored in this Twitter relationship.
MR: This also comes under the umbrella of the Live For Now, five-year approach Pepsi is taking.
SS: Yes. At the most strategic level, it made Pepsi launch new global positioning. This is very much a piece of activating that global positioning, which is about Live For Now, maximize your life, grab it by the horns, get the most out of it. One critical way of doing that is inspiring and inviting our consumers to get the most out of life, and a key part of that is these Twitter-influenced concerts.
MR: This Summer Beats Concert Series is in association with Billboard. How did the association come about?
SS: Billboard has been a partner with us for a long time and we’ve done a lot of different things with them. Given their deep credibility in the music space and the way they connect not just with the music industry, but also the hardcore music fans, it just made a perfect fit to partner with them for this.
MR: Do you feel that these series–the Live For Now initiative and the Summer Beats Concert Series, are helping to change or reshape the landscape of how interactive music delivery within the concert experience is going to be in the future?
SS: I’m really glad you asked that, because I think there’s no question about it. The reason why I say that is, even if you look at the past week, with what happened with the Olympic opening ceremonies where there’s a time delay for the broadcast airing on NBC, it was a disappointment because a lot of people already knew what was going on just by looking at their Twitter stream. And in fact, there were a few stories in the press about it, about how this is from another era, the way that was managed. But with this Twitter live stream event, what we’re doing is we’re truly connecting physical world activity to the digital ecosystem, giving it a lot more scale by streaming a concert online, giving consumers the ability to participate in the concert even if they can’t be physically there and it’s all happening in real time. There’s no such thing as a time delay or anything like that. I would say yes, absolutely, this is the future of entertainment experiences, where you mix and match the physical and the digital worlds, and even the TV world. Gloriana was on Good Morning America talking about what’s happening. You make each piece work with the others.
MR: So everything is synchronized in order for this to be a complete experience for the fans.
SS: Exactly.
MR: Even though you can’t predict what the future is going to be as far as social media or where Twitter is headed as its next level, are you poised to be able to immediately jump into whatever the next movement is within the changes of social media and technology? In the very least, are you aware of the concept and you’re on top of it?
SS: Absolutely. And to make sure we’re on top of it and connected with the startup community and broad social media trends, we have a very powerful digital labs initiative where we connect with entrepreneurs, with startups that basically help us see what’s coming down the road, give us the finger on the pulse of what’s happening and continually keep us in shape for this evolving media system. So yes, it’s very much top-of-mind, we pay a lot of attention to it. In fact, we have a partnership with WeWork Labs, which is a startup co-location space where we spend time with these startups. So, no question, there’s a variety of things we do to stay connected.
MR: Will there be a proliferation of the platforms? In other words, right now, it’s with Twitter. Do you see an expansion of where the series might end up, other than an RSS feed grabbing it?
SS: I would say absolutely. Our philosophy is that we want to be where our consumers are, and we want to give them unique experiences that make sense for our brand, make sense for them, and make sense for platforms. It can definitely grow and appear in other platforms, but what I’d say is that as it does, you’ll see that it gets customized to the trends of that platform, and the way people participate in experiences on those. So it isn’t a case of just taking one formula and pushing it out everywhere. You can’t do a Twitter-influenced concert in the same way if you’re doing something on Facebook, or elsewhere.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne