Pepsi’s Youniverse Makes Pictures Worth a Thousand Friends
Pepsi is one of the world’s most widely recognized global brands. Now it’s linking to one of the world’s favorite sports with a social network that lets members find out which of five major soccer stars most closely fit their personality type.
The site, www.pepsiyouniverse.com, is built on a networking platform from London-based Imagini Holdings, and one of its most interesting features is that it asks registered members to categorize themselves using pictures rather than text descriptions. Visitors answer questions such as “What do you like best about soccer?” by choosing one of 12 photos that show teammates working together, fans rooting in the stands, some tricky ball handling, and so on.
After doing that for a short series of questions that ask how they relax, what they would enjoy most about being a star athlete and what they like least about the sport, fans are shown how closely their answers resemble those given by the big names associated with the promotions, including French athlete Thierry Henry, Brazilian star Ronaldinho and, inevitably, David Beckham, who plays for both the English national team and the Los Angeles Galaxy.
Participants in the PepsiYouniverse network will also get access to exclusive footage and downloads of their favorite soccer stars and will get the chance to share their own soccer anecdotes and passions on their profile pages and to befriend other like-minded fans.
“We invented something we call VisualDNA as a way to let people discover something about themselves and others around them,” says Alex Willcock, founder and CEO of Youniverse. “Because images are such a direct way to convey feelings, through that medium you can make immediate connectivity with other people. Then you’ve got a way to begin a conversation with others.”
Of course, images are also a good tool for building a Web social network meant to reach out to many different nationalities. The PepsiYouniverse.com site is live now in the U.S. and the U.K. and will go live in other parts of Europe later on this year.
Willcock says he was originally contacted by Pepsi’s digital agency Safari Sundays when its president found the freestanding Youniverse network on the Web. Besides white-labeling the PepsiYouniverse site, the company runs its own social network that links up some 6 million registered members based on VisualDNA. It also offers to give them advice on everything from romantic partners to home design based on the photos they gravitate to.
“What impresses me about Pepsi is that while lots of brands talk about being progressive, Pepsi’s committed to bringing their consumers innovation,” Willcock says. “They thought we were the coolest thing on the Web.”
The PepsiYouniverse promotion will be supported by an ongoing multi-million dollar global ad campaign including TV, print, outdoor and ins-store promotions. Future promotions on the PepsiYouniverse site will move away from sports and focus on musical preferences and more generally “hopes and dreams”.
While Youniverse has developed widgets for Facebook and other social networks that link users to its freestanding network, Willcock says the decision has not yet been made whether to build widgets for the Pepsi branded version of the network.
Related Topics: Promo Trends, User-Generated Content
