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MacCrossMarketing
One of my favorite skits from Saturday Night Live over the past couple of years is MacGruber. This MacGyver spoof (only 15 years after the show ended) features Will Forte as MacGruber, "making life-saving inventions out of household materials." Unfortunately, each time MacGruber is faced with a life-and-death situation, some external event—a gay son coming out, a relapse into alcoholism, or undermining office gossip—causes the obsessive agent to become distracted, and inevitably culminating with a massive explosion.
During the fourth quarter of last night's Super Bowl™, Pepsi ran an ad featuring the SNL MacGruber team (along with the Richard Dean Anderson, TV's MacGyver), in a typical bomb detonation scenario. Only this time, in a very "meta" moment, MacGruber is taken from his task by his obligations to his new sponsor, Pepsi, even to point of changing his name to Pepsuber.
Very creative ad, and although I don't necessarily like seeing my joys appropriated to sell carbonated sugar water, I voiced my pleasure with Pepsuber on the microblogging site Twitter. "Never mind the bullocks, I love Pepsi MacGruber."
Within a few minutes (maybe seconds), I received this response from a twitterer called PepSuber: "That's right PepSuber!"
Taking a look at PepSuber's Twitter page, apparently he (likely a team of Pepsubers) was trolling Twitter and responding to all those who twittered something on the ad. While this is likely not the first, or even thousandth, instance of the use of Twitter for cross-marketing, with its connection to the mega-soda-maker and a Super Bowl™ ad, I bet it is one of the largest efforts to date, and worth a mention.
I doubt I'll be drinking Pepsi products in any greater number than I did before the ad (coming from Alabama it's God, Country, and Coke—and not necessarily in that order), but I do commend Pepsi for their creativity, and also curse them for gunking up my Twitter stream with pure marketing swill.
[guitar grind--eeeeehhhhhrrrr] "MacCrossMarketing! Making crass commercialism out of social networking..."