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The superbowl is the championship game in the national football league in the US, the premier American football league. Exclusive television broadcast rights rotate amongst 3 of the 4 major American television networks and because of its high viewership advertising time is the most expensive of the year. This year is only the second year in history that advertising prices have dropped at the superbowl. 30 second commercials are selling at a bargain price of $2.5 million dollars, that’s a drop of $500,000.

During the super bowl in the US you can get over 90,000,000 viewers on TV and Pepsi have been one of the big advertisers over the last few years, however, this year they’ve decided not to advertise.

So why would Pepsi decide not to advertise after advertising for more than 20 years in a row? social media is the answer. They have decided to put the $20 million dollar budget into social media cause marketing.

Their social media campaign is called Pepsi refresh. This site will allow people to vote for worthwhile local community projects and pepsi will pay towards them. Their grants range from $5,000 to $250,000.

The benefits of social media cause marketing are numerous including increased brand awareness, sales, customer loyalty, increased employee morale and much more.

Advertising revenue on TV will consistently go down over the next years and so will Newspaper advertising revenue. The whole advertising industry is going through significant change both online and offline and it’s going to be interesting to see how it pans out.

Do you think that Pepsi will benefit more with their social media campaign instead of an advertising campaign?