NEW YORK ? A PepsiCo executive at ad: tech said that a campaign spanning on-site, digital out-of-home, online, social and mobile effectively reintroduced the SoBe brand to influential consumers at South-by-Southwest.

To promote the new look and feel of its reskinned line of its elixirs and teas, SoBe invited SXSW attendees to stop by the Lizard Lounge during the Interactive conference. In-between daily happy hours, visitors were invited to virtually reskin themselves with help from SoBe's "Reskin Yourself" station, which let them superimpose digital tattoos onto their photos and share the images via their social networks.

?The goal was to completely restage the SoBe brand, move from glass bottles to a plastic package and bring it to 2010 and get it out of the 1996 era it had been stuck in,? said Rami Jabaji, associate brand manager of SoBe at PepsiCo, Purchase, NY.

?PepsiCo is a sponsor of South-by-Southwest, and we had to reintroduce the world and beyond to the SoBe brand and its restage, and engage with the influencers at SXSX,? he said. ?The campaign also had to live beyond the event and continue to engage consumers along the way.

?We wanted to leverage technology in a new way that hadn?t been done before, and we asked [the agency] Firstborn for a turnaround in just a couple of weeks.?

PepsiCo?s SoBe is a brand of teas, fruit-juice blends, smoothies, energy drinks and enhanced water beverages.

The name SoBe is an abbreviation of South Beach, named after the upscale area in Miami.

SoBe's Lizard Lounge
SoBe?s Reskin Yourself campaign at SXSW was a digital out-of-home campaign, but it had nothing to do with signage.

The brand invited visitors to its Lizard Lounge to snap a photo, choose a digital tattoo and share virtual reskinned photos of themselves with friends, fans and followers. 

Dan LaCivita, president of Firstborn, New York, said that his team came up with the ?Reskin Yourself? theme because it fit in with SoBe?s logo, which is a lizard, and the rebranding theme.

SoBe set up iMac computers and TV monitors in and around its tent at SXSW, and visitors could use the keyboards and mouse to scale and rotate the image.

Attendees could also use a touchscreen in the Lizard Lounge to move around the tattoo to any part of their picture and adjust the visual effects.

The kiosk at SXSW offered digital tattoos ranging from SoBe logos and lizards to HTML5 tags and random words such as ?Helvetica.?

The idea was to make the tattoos look as real as possible so consumers could fool their friends and family into thinking they actually got a tattoo at South-by-Southwest.

Once completed, participants were sent the following message on their handset:

?We love the new skin you got at SXSW. Fool your friends into thinking you got an actual tattoo. Go to http://sxsw.sobe.com, Facebook.com and Twitter.com/sobeworld.?

Firstborn then helped Sobe launch a Web portal at http://reskin.sobe.com and also turned it into an application that incorporated an additional sharing mechanism.

The application lets users share via Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, download a jpeg of the image, email it and try again.

?To see consumers actually taking some of our graphics that are on our packaging and virtually tattooing themselves?there isn?t anything better for a brand than to see our lizard icon out there on people?s bodies,? Mr. Jabaji said. ?It?s been a big win for us.

?It?s been a great way for us to reintroduce the SoBe brand,? he said. ?We got a lot of good engagement with people, and a lot of people did it more than once.

?People sent it to their mom and their mom would freak out, thinking the tattoo was real.?

Limore Shur, executive creative director at eyeball NYC, New York, and Alan Schulman, chairman and chief creative officer of U.Dig, New York, also presented during the session.

Final Take

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