Pepsi's Aquafina Suits Up for Fashion Week

PepsiCo’s Aquafina brand began a two-year sponsorship of Olympus Fashion Week with a big splash. The bottler created a microsite, which features podcasts, to host updates from the week’s events in New York City.

The microsite, found at aquafinafashion.com, features photos from each designer’s show along with the podcasts. Visitors can rate each designer for varying levels of taste ranging from perfect, tres chic, questionable, and faux pas. Aquafina senior brand manager, Michael Hammer said the sponsorship, and voting on taste was the perfect mix for Aquafina’s motto, “Pure Water, Perfect Taste.”

Industry trade Fashion Week Daily supplied two reporters, Faran Krentcil and Peter Davis, to produce a series of podcasts to provide color commentary on each designer’s collection. Audio files were available on the site within a half-hour of every show.

Advertisements ran online to promote the site. “Primarily all of our advertising was done online with what I’ll call our key influencer audience. A lot of fashion and club Web sites,” Hammer told ClickZ News. “We directed traffic through email blasts and advertising to AquafinaFashion.com.”

Aquafina’s sponsorship includes Olympus Fashion Week in New York and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Los Angeles. Aquafina has signed on for the spring 2006 collections, fall 2006 collections, and spring 2007 collections that will be shown next fall.

“We feel like it’s turned out extremely well. We have given away a lot of bottles of Aquafina,” said Hammer. “Also we sampled Flavor Splash in our booth. There’s been a lot of response to Flavors, and having water given out on 90 degree days.”

No a stranger to microsites, Aquafina has set up sites for each of its new lines, Flavor Splash and Aquafina Sparkling.

Next on the agenda for the bottler is Aquafina Film. The company plans to sponsor a number of film festivals. For the film festival circuit, the microsite will be developed by Aquafina’s agency, Tribal DDB.