At the Ace Hotel yesterday, PepsiCo's Global Director of Digital and Social Media, Bonin Bough, identified a lag in enterprise level innovation and pinpointed the marketers' means for closing the gap and transforming laggards into leaders.
To understand Bough's insight for success is to see his big picture: Society is adopting new technologies at lightning speed, but while organizations drag their feet, the rest of the world is well on its way to becoming what he calls a "100 percent digital society."
In an effort to save brands from impending irrelevance in a digital world, Bough sees it as a marketers' responsibility to help organizations dedicate themselves to an idea he subscribes to called "digital fitness." Champions of this fitness regimen will identify new technologies, weave innovation into corporate culture and tap into the technologies that are transforming us in ways we never expected.
At PepsiCo digital fitness started with a needs assessment that compared the brand's digital marketing against the competition. Instead of settling with industry standard though, he had the foresight to look three years ahead.
That's when Bough found influencer relationship management (IRM) and signed up with YouCast. Together the organizations built a database of digital influencers to acquire and nurture. Then YouCast and PepsiCo designed a program that leverages these trusted social publishers to to help spread brand conversations across paid, earned, and owned media.
When applied to PepsiCo's portfolio company Gatorade in Gatorade Mission Control, the brand uses YouCast's IRM platform to build customized measures of impact and success based on brand priorities as outlined by the influencer marketing objectives. The resulting data is then applied to smarter and more informed ad spend, but it's also helpful for publishers anxious to prove they can make an impact.
Bough calls not investing in this kind of marketing the equivalent of "leaving cash on the table." Today this could very well be the case, but in three years the investment in influencer marketing could easily mean the difference between having cash on the table at all.