Yesterday marked the end of the first month of the Pepsi Refresh Project, with the initial batch of winners being announced today. For those who haven’t been following this innovative marketing campaign, it was unveiled earlier this year when Pepsi decided to take a big batch of its Super Bowl ad dollars and funnel it into a project designed to produce something more useful than another goofy commercial starring a chimp.

 

Here’s how “Refresh” works: People submit ideas online proposing various “do-good” initiatives—everything from setting up neighborhood educational programs to finding new ways to help senior citizens take care of their pets—and then the public votes on the best ideas. Pepsi then funds the people or groups behind each of the most popular ideas, to the tune of anywhere from $5,000 to $250,000 per project. Every month for the rest of this year, a new batch of winners will be announced and funded by Pepsi.

 

It’ll end up costing Pepsi about $20 million to do this—about as much as it would cost to produce and run a half-dozen glitzy Super Bowl commercials. But when all is said and done, that same money will have funded hundreds of projects across the country, potentially helping thousands of people in small and large ways. I like chimp ads as much as the next guy, but I’d say that’s a pretty good tradeoff.

 

And it’s good for Pepsi, too. They’re banking on the idea that the world has changed and people are now expecting more than just sales-pitches from brands. More than ever, companies now are being judged on what they do, not just what they say. Bruce Mau talks about this a lot in Glimmer. Mau actually believes that marketers should stop interrupting people with unwanted messages, and focus those same resources on doing something worthwhile—something people will actually want to hear about, and maybe even get involved with. The “Refresh” program is right in line with this thinking.

 

The program also taps into the popular movement that I’m trying to connect with on this site. It’s a movement of everyday people trying to design innovative solutions to the problems they see all around them. A lot of us have come to the realization that no one is going to solve these problems for us; the solutions are more likely to come from grass roots initiatives. What Pepsi is doing with “Refresh” is to encourage and support those kinds of initiatives. Does it create a lot of “hype” on behalf of Pepsi? Of course—that’s the point. But cynics should be careful about dismissing this as “just another form of advertising.” It’s actually a better form of advertising, in that it serves multiple purposes, not only helping to promote a brand, but also doing some other constructive stuff in the process. We’ll see how effective this is for Pepsi, but I think this trend toward “actions instead of just words” may represent the future of advertising.

 

In any case, if you have a great idea for how to help your community, your school, the environment, or people in need halfway across the world, check out the Refresh Project site and it’ll tell you how to get your idea out there for consideration and possible funding. (The site, by the way, is beautifully and intuitively designed by the hot Brooklyn design firm known as Huge). And I should note that one of the driving forces behind this project is the TBWA advertising creative chief Lee Clow, who’s also one of the featured Glimmerati in my book. If I’d known about the Refresh project at the time I was writing Glimmer, it definitely would’ve been one of the featured stories.

 

By the way, another member of the Glimmerati, Emily Pilloton of the Project H design group, was among those who submitted initiatives during the first month of the Refresh Project. Emily was trying to secure funding for an innovative high school program in rural North Carolina. Looks like she didn’t make the final cut in terms of getting Pepsi funding, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a great project, worthy of attention and support: Project H plans to go into one of the poorest regions in the country with a program that will help give kids the design skills and know-how to begin improving their own community. For more info on Emily’s project, check out http://www.refresheverything.com/StudioH