Sprite’s Vogel Sponsorship Is a Sign of More to Come

Posted By Joe Pulizzi on April 20, 2009

You may have seen it already.  Sprite has enlisted the help of both YouTube and Facebook to promote "Green Eyed World", a new reality-remix series featuring budding UK musician Katie Vogel.

Over the next 52 weeks, Vogel's "I'm gonna make it in New York" opportunity will be followed through five YouTube shows over eight months, as well as countless blog postings and social media outlets. The first show (episode 0) has good production quality, and the link-up with Facebook makes too much sense.

Overall, this is a cool content sponsorship by Sprite...but here's what interests me the most:

• Sprite launched this campaign with no media spend at first.  They counted on Vogel's friends (a few thousand) and other staff's friends to get the word out.  By the time I viewed the episode, the video had been viewed over 50,000 times.  A solid grass roots start.
• Whether a brand is trying to influence music fans, marketing lovers, or construction workers, influence will count.  Whereas marketers sponsored corporate products in the past (TV shows, magazines through advertising), we are now seeing a shift to sponsoring individual products (such as sponsored blog posts). Even though Sprite has created their own content through this series (but treating it more like a sponsorship), Katie already having a large fan-base made a difference. Her personality made a difference. Her social media savvy made a difference.

It's unclear where this is all going. I believe that the best thing for marketers to do is to create consistently valuable content that their customers would be interested in, and spread it around like crazy. That said, it's not easy, and many corporations don't dedicate to the "consistent" part. Without committing to consistent content over a long period of time, it just won't work. So, many marketers will start to allign with individual influencers that can create the content for them, and ride the waves.  Successful marketing in the future will probably revolve around both options.

So, if I were you, I'd start finding those voices in your industry that are spreading "your gospel" and support them through sponsorship. That, and of course, do it yourself. That's exactly what Sprite is doing.