Since winning X-factor, singer Melanie Amaro has really entered onto the scene, while the show itself isn’t doing so well. Amaro is jovial after recently shooting a Pepsi Super Bowl ad with the music giant and piano man Elton John. …

PepsiCo is introducing a prototype for a fully interactive new vending machine at the National Automatic Merchandising Association’s One Show in Chicago this week.  It is called the “Social Vending System” and I gotta say, it looks pretty awesome. The …

Pepsi will reportedly be skipping its annual Super Bowl commercials, and will instead invest the money it would generally spend on those, in social media marketing. This would make the first time in 23 years that Pepsi will not have Super Bowl ads.

Larry D. Woodard, President and CEO of Manhattan ad agency Vigilante writes in an ABC News piece:

In these uncertain economic times, advertisers need to make their ads count if they don’t want to throw away precious dollars on ineffective Internet advertising. Online advertising is still a great way to market your business, as it is highly targeted, and can provide both an unparalleled branding appeal and instant conversion (depending on the nature of the ad). But effective ads must be engaging. They must give a viewer a reason to care. That is a large part of the battle.

Caring and Sharing

Recently, PepsiCo and Edelman Digital staged a small event to tap the minds of 25 social media marketing experts about how best to engage the online community. The event began with mystery packages and ended with a discussion in a special branded area of FriendFeed called the Pepsi Cooler.

The results, though, seem a little flat.

A billion dollar giveaway starting February 1st will help Amazon.com take on Apple’s iTunes for consumer music purchases.

It’s somewhat surprising that this is Coca Cola’s first number one spot on Harris’s "Best Brands" poll, considering the amount of money the company spends on branding and the subsequent associations branding has built in the consumer mind.

Another clue that perception, not truth, is what you can expect from people comes out of Penn State today. A study reveals that Web searchers prefer Yahoo over Google; the only problem is, they chose a logo, not a search engine.

John Battelle notes that Google’s market capitalization is now just north of 80 billion dollars, making it the largest media company on the planet, overtaking Time Warner.

Reviving a WB television program that tanked last summer, Pepsi and Yahoo! are teaming up to add the music show, Smash, to Yahoo! Music’s cache of features.

The Pepsi Bottling Group reported first quarter 2005 net income of $39 million, or diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $0.15.

One of the most interesting developments in the golden era of transparency is that consumers are sharing all kinds of information to hack/circumvent traditional promotions such as coupons, contests and giveaways.