In yet another attempt to bring together the worlds of Mountain Dew and videogames, PepsiCo created the DEWmocracy. This Massively-Multiplayer Online game casts players as “an anonymous hero that rebels against the the forces of uniformity and seeks a new world, and a new elixir, that will change everything”. That must be pretty interesting because hundreds of thousands of gamers have already begun doing the Dew.

According to Frank Cooper, VP of marketing at Pepsi-Cola North America, the game’s website DEWmocracy.com has had over 700,000 visitors, 200,000 of which have actually registered on the site and participated in the game. Mr. Cooper added:

Those are great numbers, because we hadn’t expected that many people to get involved in phase one of this campaign, which had an elaborate registration process and had a pretty significant game that required a time commitment. With phase two, when the program comes out of the game and people begin to campaign and vote for the new flavor, that’s the mainstream proposition that allows non-gamers and anyone to come in and vote in the Dewmocracy process. We expect a bigger leap in numbers for that.

Essentially, this is all an elaborate plot by PepsiCo to let the consumers decide the next Mountain Dew flavor, as opposed to doing the research themselves. Anyone who happened to try the Halo 3 branded “Gamer Fuel” is probably incredibly interested in preventing such atrocities from assaulting our taste buds ever again. Let’s hope Joe Average Consumer has better taste than PepsiCo’s R&D department.

This information, however, led me to wonder: how can people play an MMO to decide the new flavor of something if they don’t ever actually taste it? Well, PepsiCo apparently realized how silly this all was and now will have three winning flavors. The flavors will be bottled and put to a national taste test, starting this July, to crown the ultimate in soda tastiness.

So what becomes of the game after that? Well, according to Mr. Cooper, if the demand is still there, they will expand DEWmocracy into a full-fledged long-term MMO, like an actual game! Crazy! Unfortunately, he didn’t specify whether or not there would also be a collectible card game or if Shamans will continue to get nerfed.

Thanks go out to Norm over at www.meetinthelobby.com for pointing this news out to us. Show him some love and visit his site.

Source

Tags: advertising, cola, marketing, MMO, mountain-dew, multiplayer, pepsi, pepsico, viral, World-of-Warcraft

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