Watching TV While Gulping Mountain Dew: A Fascinating Look at the Shows Dewheads Tweet About Most

'Problem Solverz,' 'Dude, What would Happen?' and 'Empire Records' Get Them Talking

Last week in this space I shared some interesting data about advertising-as-media -- data generated exclusively for Ad Age by Bluefin Labs, which looked at the social-media response to two "Summer Time is Pepsi Time" spots. I was interested in the fact that people who are engaged with social media are prone to treating both TV shows and the commercials that air during them as, well, content -- content worth commenting about. (As I pointed out last week, while everyone in the business continues to obsess about time-shifting via DVR, Hulu, etc., most people still watch TV shows when the networks first air them.)

Cambridge, Mass.-based Bluefin's expertise is in providing brands, agencies and media companies with real-time TV-audience insights through social-media analysis. It's been building a massive database called the TV Genome, which it defines as "data created by mapping social-media commentary back to its stimulus on TV." The science behind Bluefin's research is pretty heady -- Deb Roy, Ph.D., the co-founder and CEO of the company, is director of the Cognitive Machines Group at the MIT Media Lab -- but it gets really interesting (and accessible) when you dive in looking for relationships and affinities.

The chart below represents an exclusive first look at a fresh-out-the-labs Bluefin data-mining project. It shows brand-to-show affinity: what the people who talk the most about a particular brand -- in this case, Mountain Dew -- in social media (primarily on Twitter and Facebook) have also been talking about when it comes to TV shows that have aired year-to-date. Some notes:

• First, you may be wondering what exactly people tend to say about Mountain Dew in the social-media sphere. I was curious myself, so I culled several examples from Twitter this morning: @earthtoanneh: "Things i've bought this holiday: mountain dew, mountain dew, bag for ipad, mountain dew. #yay"; @wh0isjack: "Mountain Dew > Every other beverage"; @miaashamiss: "They don't have mountain dew?! Oh, my god. What am I supposed to drink?!"; @rstevens: "Captain Beefheart, Mountain Dew and Photoshop. Any sufficiently late work night is indistinguishable from college." (I can definitely relate to that last one.) It's pretty clear that people who think to tweet about Mountain Dew are generally fans and consumers of the product.

• According to Bluefin, over 2,700 different shows (including made-for-TV and theatrically-released movies) have aired in prime time across all U.S. broadcast and cable networks year-to-date. Which means the top 15 shows below -- the shows Mountain Dew commenters commented about the most -- comprise a very select list. The rings of the circle represent the social-TV rating scale: If a spoke tip approaches the outermost ring -- if a blue-green line is long -- it means that the show has a high level of social-media engagement in general (not just among Dewheads); short spokes represent a low level of social-media engagement in general. The 1-through-15 numbers rank the shows most commented on by Dewheads, with the Cartoon Network's comedic cartoon "The Problem Solverz" in the No. 1 spot.

• In the case of Mountain Dew, the top 15 affinity show all have middle-of-the-road social-TV ratings -- which means that although people who are prone to comment about Mountain Dew are also excited about commenting on these particular shows, the general population of TV viewers is not nearly so excited about doing so.

• The tightest clustering for Mountain Dew commenters is around comedy shows. This isn't a huge surprise -- Mountain Dew is positioned as an irreverent brand with a goofy, quasi-comedic subtext (and of course Mountain Dew buys advertising time on irreverent networks and shows) -- but taken together with the other shows and the kinds of movies Dew commenters comment about when they air on TV (including indie-ish coming-of-age flick "Empire Records," the Mickey Rourke drama "The Wrestler" and the Johnny Knoxville comedy "The Ringer"), you can get an almost instantaneous sense of the psychographic at play here.

• "We see different dynamics across different brands, even when they're in the same sector," Bluefin's Tom Thai tells me. "For example, the Diet Coke brand has tight clustering around reality shows, while Sprite has tight clustering around movies."

Why Brands Are The New Labels (And Publishers, And Producers...)

A stand out panel at SXSW 2011, Brands as the New Labels, found particular resonance this year. Of course this isn't exactly a new trend -- big brands, particularly ones focused on the youth markets, have traditionally been responsible for helping to amplify the hottest new music. Red Bull, Mountain Dew and Heineken are all great examples of brands that are winning by shifting dollars towards breaking acts, and experimenting with marketing campaigns and programs.

Gone are the days of artists hoping and praying for that major studio deal -- which later they learn isn’t really that major. Instead they can take a paycheck from a brand and get pretty much the same thing as what they would get from your typical 360 deal offering. In fact, brands are finding success with this new approach. Green Label Sound, Mountain Dew’s exclusive label designed to “empower independent artist,” releases singles, videos and remixes by buzz bands: Matt & Kim, Neon Indian, Chromeo, Cool Kids and Theopolis London. And, it appears that The Cool Kids prefer working with a brand: "Labels suck," the Cool Kids' Chuck Inglish says with a laugh. "What can they do that Pepsi can't do? We had a good experience with Green Label Sound -- we got more from that single than we got from our previous album. I was tired of the album sitting around and just wanted to get it out."

After a recent trip to Red Bull Headquarters in Los Angeles, I think an artist might be better off signing with a brand anyway. The offices are certainly more fun! Last time I visited Warner Bros, I didn’t see a half pipe in the office, or days dedicated to office-wide ping-pong tournaments. Plus, these brands are better positioned to market talent, as they can put a hefty budget behind their efforts. Red Bull produces several impressive signature events that drive tons of awareness online and IRL. And because the advertiser is also the label, they can be very strategic in their approach. Talk about brand integration… this is the 2.0 world.

My other takeaway from SXSW 2011 was the realization that brand dollars don’t stop with the cultivating of new talent. Brands are positioning themselves as the new labels, no doubt, but they are also evolving into the content creators. There is, naturally, criticism of branded entertainment – it is necessarily the opposite of arms-length, unbiased reporting - but as the digital landscape has changed media integration, it has also increased consumer tolerance for brands looking for new ways to market. And if you want high quality content -- whether that is music or print or video -- someone needs to pay. So, brands are stepping up as the new content publishers. They are still paying to be part of the story but now they are also experimenting with creating and distributing their own stories, too. Case in point: media personality Shira Lazar covered the festival for Chevy, and Fuse TV’s Allison Hagendorf brought an inside look at SXSW for Nikon. (Full disclosure, my company IRL Productions produced the daily recap Nikon videos, included below.)


#SXSWNikon with Allison Hagendorf - Day 5 from Nikon SXSW on Vimeo.


Early tech-adopter brand PepsiCo is trying out this approach, as well, seeding blog posts and videos on their employee blog and Women’s Inspiration Network (WIN). PepsiCo’s Jamie Stein did double-duty as host, generating a significant amount of video and blog content over the course of the festival. Pepsi also ran a “Davos of Digital” series of web interviews leading up to SXSW. (More disclosure: I work with Pepsi on many digital projects, though I did not work with them on these particular projects at SXSW.)

On a larger level, brands are making a point of generating content on social sites as well – not just twitter and facebook (a must by this point for most big brands), but taking advantage of new intimate-feeling platforms like Instagram (NBCNews) and Bntr (HowAboutWe, Zappos). Brands are going everywhere their customers are, and might soon be.

So what does it all mean? Traditional media is rapidly changing across every industry. Many industries are still behind the times -- music, book publishing, TV and cable - and getting up this new curve. Despite all the amazing innovation we have out there, it's still anyone's game on how to monetize. There are marketers everywhere taking risks and changing games – and new platforms to change them on. A sign of the changing times are New York Subway platform advertisements, encouraging riders to scan this QR code, follow on Twitter and "friend" on Facebook. Even as short as six months ago, those messages weren't as prominent.

At the March 2011 Shorty Awards, Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley pointed out that he saw an ad on TV encouraging people to discover the song in the Old Navy ad using Shazam. The call-to-action is then obvious: Purchase on iTunes. Old Navy, Apple, a digital startup and an emerging artist all working together as one? That's some epic progress – over some pretty blurry lines. Expect more of this going forward.

A Brief History of Product Placement in Movies Edited by Oliver Noble

Jay Electronica Lands in New Mountain Dew Campaign

Jay Electronica has yet to release his debut album, but a major endorsement deal has already materialized for the recent Roc Nation signee, who appears in a new ad for Mountain Dew.


The New Orleans emcee is featured in a new commercial for Mountain Dew's Code Red campaign "It's Different on the Mountain." In the video ad, Jay Elect presents a remixed version of his song 'The Announcement' on stage, before the footage wraps up with the tag line, "Hip Hop Is Different on the Mountain."

"This is the first time I've done something like this ... of this magnitude, this nature," Jay Electronica explained about the collaboration with Mountain Dew. "I'm pretty excited about it ... As artists, we come to a point where we conform so much, that when somebody is actually trying to learn who they are and express who they are as an individual and give their expression it's foreign." Check out Jay Electronica's Mountain Dew commercial below.





BEHIND THE SCENES OF JAY ELECTRONICA MOUNTAIN DEW CODE RED AD AFTER JUMP