Gatorade Mission Control

Speaking at MediaPost Communications' OMMA Social day-long forum, Bonin Bough, director of digital and social media at PepsiCo whom established a "Mission Control Center" for Gatorade that takes the brand's pulse 24/7. The center, which looks very much like a NASA control room, tracks in real time analytics for campaigns, Web sites, or social channels. Bough says the focus is on creating the largest sports brand in the world and one that goes beyond the liquid product.
"The question is," he said, "how do we create this in terms of real time insights?" The center has six monitors and five people across different functions.
Recent such experiments include a Twitter and TV media strategy for the one-off Pepsuber ad during this year's Super Bowl. "We ran in isolation of paid digital media," he said of the effort. "All we did was Twitter and drove nearly the same amount of traffic [as with paid digital]. Just with Twitter. I believe in doing small experiments and rolling them out in a big way."
He noted that the Trop50 program started as a partnership with BlogHer, which has a combined reach of 15 million unique visitors. The company created The Juice online community around a "More of what you want, less of what you don't" theme.
"We tracked versus traditional to see if we could prove that if we co-create something with a community around health, family, and relationships, we could improve brand awareness, equity and volume. When we looked at digital metrics, it was through the roof."
Bough said PepsiCo is going to start a program this year wherein consumers who scan bar codes on PepsiCo products via smartphones will get content about the brand or corporate goodwill programs.