Vivid Marketing

Vivid Marketing does decibels.

“We make a lot of noise,” said Vivid President Erik Peterson.

“They get it,” said John Stamatis, senior manager of sports marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America, which has worked with Vivid for a decade, moving from NASCAR to, among other properties, Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, the Super Bowl and X Games.

When Pepsi first hired Vivid, Coke was NASCAR’s official soft drink and Pepsi’s lone driver was Jeff Gordon. But Vivid, able to activate Pepsi programs on a track-by-track basis, went bigger and louder than NASCAR venues had ever seen.

“We became the on-site destination for the consumers that get up at 6 a.m. and beat the traffic and are at the track all morning,” Peterson said.

More recently, Vivid has developed other “subculturally relevant experiences,” Stamatis said. The AST Dew Tour for Mountain Dew is an example, wherein a two-story house moves from market to market as part of an action sports festival. The concept? “If your parents were out of town and you were teenagers, what would the house look like?” Peterson asked.

Another “tribal marketing” example: For Schick, Vivid helped create an X Games-linked program that invited teen BMXers and skateboarders to upload videos of their tricks to a Web site and shoot for a $20,000 prize.

Vivid can hush up, too, said Richard Stamper, former president of Srixon, the Japanese golf equipment company. Vivid has helped stage a golf ball sampling program at courses, where, Stamper said, “Noisy is not in the vocabulary.” But using well-cast “brand ambassadors” and after-event online communication with consumers, Stamper said, creativity aside, Vivid “has the ability to execute, too.”