Pepsi/Tomkins Crowdsource Take Me Out To The Ballgame

To celebrate the 2013 World Series, MLB sponsor Pepsi teams up with musician Mike Tompkins to recreate an old baseball classic, ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game, in a cappella style.

With just the natural sounds of baseball being played as a soundtrack backdrop, the crowd sourced sing-a-long video features baseball fans from across the US singing along to the 7^th inning stretch classic.

Shot at the Chicago Cubs iconic Wrigley Field baseball stadium (and in New York’s MLB Fan Cave), Pepsi branding features reasonably low-key throughout – with its logo on Tomkins’ baseball jersey, a few appearances of [pepsi cans and bottles and the video finishing with the brand logo and ‘Live For Now’ tagline.

Developed with agency Maker (and its new in-house ad group Maker Made), the soft drinks giant teamed up with YouTube a cappella superstar Tomkins (who boasts more than one million subscribers to his channel)

The initiative has been a huge online hit.

Within one week of it being posted on 23 October it has racked up 459,554 YouTube views (with 5,781 ‘Likes’).

Canadian Tompkins, 24, began beatboxing aged eight and has spent the last 10 years involved in a diverse range of music led production, engineering and mixing initiatives. Since 2010 he began creating a cappella music and releasing songs on his own YouTube channel and website.

Since then he has become a genuine online musical sensation.

His cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” shot to over two million views in under a month and has now ranked up almost nine million YouTube views.

Comment

Partnering with bona fide stars of the online space on creative alliances that live and breath predominately in the digital space aims to provide an element of youthful authenticity: a strategy that one could have hardly imaged when Pepsi first sponsored the MLB back in 1997.

Yet its strategy back then, when it first became a national sponsor of Major League Baseball, was to use its rights to link its youth-focused marketing with baseball’s young stars – which is exactly what it is doing with this Tomkins alliance.

of course, back in 1997 its approach was to run traditional campaigns fronted by the late 90s new breed of baseball players – who back then included Ken Griffey Jr and Derek Jeter – now genuine MLB veterans.

The initial 1997 deal was reported to be valued at $50m over five years, with $1m annually in licensing fees to be divided among the teams.

Since then, its deal has continued to extend through the sport – now rumoured to be worth more than $10m per year to MLB.

Pepsi also has a number of sponsorship deals with individual MLB teams and star players.

For several years PepsiCo typically supported its Gatorade, Pepsi Cola and Aquafina brands within its MLB activation, but lately this has extended to activating around its ready-to-drink Lipton iced tea as the new ‘Official Iced Tea of Major League Baseball’ and has run a Pepsi Max’s MLB ‘Field of Dreams’ season-long initiative