Pepsi's digital vision: "beyond simple advertising...towards meaningful sponsorships, curation and creation"

One of the characteristics of the digital marketing and media era is the role advertisers play creating and shaping content, applications and even platforms/devices.  We are back to a time when tobacco companies that sponsored "I Love Lucy" on TV and sponsors on radio set the programming agenda.  While Pepsi is by no means the only major advertiser shaping content creation, given our FTC complaint this week it's worth examining how they think about their digital role. 
Here's an excerpt from a blog post by one of their digital experts, Shiv Singh:
...how do we think about our roles in the digital ecosystem? It is best encapsulated in these four key points from the presentation:
 

1. The role of brands extends beyond simple advertising and is evolving towards meaningful sponsorships, curation and creation  at its very core. The way we are partnering with the X-Factor across retail, in show and online (check out Pepsi Sound Off and Pepsi Pulse) is an example of this. The same applies with our Call of Duty Mountain Dew partnership. Specially marked Mountain Dew packaging will feature codes that give double XP time to players in the multi-mode of Modern Warfare 3 when the game launches in November. This isn't traditional marketing.
    
2. We fully recognize that the future of digital marketing for brands  means not just playing the traditional role of the marketer which is sponsoring the experience that's created by someone else. Instead marketers need to act like startups, media companies, technology companies and of course still as brands all at once. Whether it be through our PepsiCo Beverages Digital Labs initiatives or in how we partnered with Fashion Week around the Diet Pepsi Skinny can launch acting as a mini media organization, we are already playing these roles.
    
3. For the first time, having physical products with huge distribution (we're practically in every neighborhood of America) gives us digital scale for consumer engagement. Scale that we've never realized we've had before. Whether its our cups in food-service partner outlets with QR codes or the ability to photograph our logos and get access to exclusive content, we now have unique ownable scale in the real world for digital. This has suddenly become a highly leveragable asset in the digital ecosystem.
    
4. The digital data that we are gathering now when linked to offline data gives us a view into consumers that we never had before. Last summer we ran the largest FourSquare check-in program with people around the country being able to check in at fun summer locations to get a Pepsi Summer badge. Think about the location data we've been able to capture there and how valuable it is when we co-relate it to sales data per location.