Pepsi Builds Music Series Around Twitter Data

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PepsiCo's head of digital Shiv Singh has helped his brand in recent years mesh digital marketing with music events like South by Southwest, while partnering with platforms such as Foursquare, Instagram, and BreakOutBand. But his company's new Twitter partnership has perhaps more intriguing features for connecting digital eyeballs with dancing concertgoers.

"Twitter is about capturing the excitement of now," Singh told ClickZ on Wednesday. "[The effort is] content-driven and experience-driven…It's about consumer participation. And then to a smaller extent, it's about ads as well."

For the next 12 months, his Purchase, NY-based beverages and snacks giant will analyze data about music-related tweets and publish video commentary about what bands or artists are creating the biggest buzz. Pepsi will give away weekly music downloads based on the data. Forty-nine percent of Twitter users follow at least one musician on the social site, according to Twitter.

The data will also be employed to develop a series of so-called pop-up concerts, which will take place across the United States this summer. Pepsi will alert its hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers to concerts two weeks in advance. The shows will be live-streamed on Twitter, and, Singh said, the number of performances "will be anywhere between three and 12." Artists for the concerts have not been revealed.

The Twitter data "can affect which artists are asked to perform," Singh explained. "It can affect where the performance may happen. It can affect what song choices are initially selected for the artists."

As the digital exec earlier suggested, Twitter ads - Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends - are an element of the partnership. "We are using Twitter ads on an ongoing basis," he said, "and we'll use them to promote the pop-up concert series."