In today’s world, events unfold within seconds and life-changing experiences happen at a moment’s notice.  As people go online to get the latest and greatest, advertisers’ ability to react in real-time with relevant messages is becoming more and more important – as Pepsi discovered last week. 

Pepsi were already running the “Joy It Forward” campaign in Canada when the saddening news about its former pitchman, Michael Jackson, arrived.

With Eyeblaster’s Smart Versioning tool already enabled, the agency was able to quickly tweak their creative that was already running on multiple music sites, including MuchMusic Video Awards, Yahoo Canada Music, MSN Canada Music and MySpace Canada Music.  Pepsi’s online advertising in Canada is handled by OMD Canada and BBDO/Proximity.

The campaign, while already live, went from this:

To this:

Seamlessly. 

The potential for making advertising relevant is enormous.  Eyeblaster’s Smart Versioning is a creative production tool: an ad with a mini Content Management System (CMS) that allows users to dynamically swap assets.  It enables live updates, as seen here, ad versioning and localization.  Campaigns using Smart Versioning outperform static ads in Interaction, Dwell Time, Expansion and Video Started rates.

Consider trying it out on your next campaign.

Yael Avidan, Senior Manager, Product Planning