In a brave move that could prove to be a major turning point in big brand marketing, Pepsi has decided against doing a Super Bowl ad in 2010, and investing their $20M or so in social media instead.

Meanwhile, at Strutta HQ, we collectively raise an eyebrow. We used to point to Doritos' crowd-sourcing efforts to produce their Super Bowl spot as the ultimate use of user generated content in advertising. After all, that (now 3 year) campaign was birthed in part by our CEO, Ben Pickering. Now, a huge brand has publicly opted out of the bloated Super Bowl advertising one-uppance pissing contest, and is diverting all (not just some) of the funds they would have spent into connecting with Pepsi drinkers online. It makes you wonder whether the next step will involved abondoning tv ads altogether. Time will tell.

This news came to us in the form of a presser released this morning by our neighbors at Adhack. We also found this interview with a spokesperson for PepsiCo.

“Pepsi’s $20-million commitment to social media instead of its Super Bowl commercial is a substantial shift in where they put their marketing efforts, and a groundbreaking shift in how they can measure their return on investment," said Adhack Founder James Sherrett. "It’s a smart move.”

PepsiCo Spokesperson Nicole Bradley confirms that the soda pop company has given this some thought, and they expect it to be a better investment, long term. "...our beverage brands' marketing strategy in 2010 [is] less about a singular event and more about a movement, said Bradley. "We are always looking to further develop our two-way conversation with consumers."

So what comes next? How should Pepsi divert those funds to get the most out of the web, and best connect with fans of the syrupy, bubbly stuff? If you're asking us, we'd like to see some of that invested in online contests and with the talented creatives that make-up the Adhack community, for starters. Seems to us to be a great way to reflect Pepsi's fanbase, and help to distance them from the Britney Spears/Michael Jackson high budget spectacles of old.

If you want to know more about how to invest in marketing on the web and put online photo and video contests to work for you, contact us. We'd be happy to answer your questions. During office hours (Pacific time) we can be reached at 1-877-477-5717.

Of all of the services that we offer as part of our online contest software, it is our secure voting process and user verification that set us apart.

Settling on a user-friendly, safe and easy voting method has not been easy, though. In fact, since our launch in late December, we've made two major improvements to it, and completely redesigned the "look" of the process twice as well.

We thought it would be fitting to share a little "behind the scenes" of how our newest voting flow came to be. First, a little history, provide by our Senior Architect, Steven Wittens:

All of Strutta is built on top of the open source Drupal system. This is a popular platform that runs some of the most trafficked sites on the web. In particular, we use the Drupal Voting API module to tabulate our votes, which is a tried and true solution. The code for all of this is freely available at Drupal.org for review.

On top of Drupal's own high quality code, we add some additional measures to ensure fairness.  Firstly, we require all accounts to be signed up with a valid (and verified) e-mail address, and we have several safeguards in place to prevent abuse of common e-mail services. Secondly, our entry browsing system equalizes exposure for all contest entries, regardless of when they were added. When we present random entries to content voters, our system prioritizes those entries that have been viewed the least. Thus everyone gets a fair share of exposure, and the benefit you get from submitting early is minimized.

With a few notes about how this has been implemented on our site for the latest version of the voting process, here's Senior Developer Mike Holly:

Our users are required to verify their accounts (by clicking an activation link sent in an email) before voting. In an effort to streamline the registration process as much as possible, and provide "instant gratification" to our users, we initially decided to record all votes immediately. However, as users often failed to verify their accounts, unconfirmed votes were removed from the system after a certain amount of time. Unfortunately, this led to a great deal of confusion amongst our users, as decreases in vote counts were perceived as errors in the system.

We're glad to announce that we have resolved these usability issues and have run the new system through extensive usability tests. With the new system, anonymous users must still register when voting or submitting entries, but, this time around, all new votes and entries are kept in a "pending" state until the user clicks the email verification link. When the verification link is clicked, the user is notified that their votes have been made permanent and finally redirected back to the contest site. Once at the site, the user can clearly see that their vote has been recorded. We're hoping that these changes help make our system as transparent and usable as possible.

Thank you Mike, for that very clear and candid explanation. Even with all of this carefully considered development and execution, our system still needs a "front end;" what we in the internet business refer to as the "user experience. Tha masterful artist behind what you see in this most excellent voting process is none other than Ross Howard-Jones. Here's "HoJo" with a few words about the look and feel:

We really wanted to clean up the login/register iframe (the registration box that appears) within our competition platform to help with user flow and clarity. The first version wasn't quite as flexible as we needed it to be. We kept on running into issues of the size of the iframe, so one one the first things we improved was to have the iframe expandable.

The second was the look of the iframe. The design was simple, but still felt out of place when initiated within one of the unique themes that our users had come up with. We needed something that would work well across the board with all of the themes. We came up with a even simpler design that incorporates transparencies to blend with the theme behind it. This seems to keep the user's experience more seamless.

The last thing was to improve not only the language within the iframe but also position of the copy to make everything more obvious to the user. The user's actions now flow together to make everything feel a bit more linear and supported.

So you can see that a great deal of work and preparation go into something that is meant to seem intuitive and easy. That's the challenge; building a tool that is accessible to all levels of internet users, and that is low-friction for people to enter contests and cast their votes.

We've also been asked several times about "single sign-on" for member sites, and other methods of verifying identity  and we are exploring all of them, especially for our pending API.

We're pleased with this latest iteration of the voting process, but we know it's not likely the last change we'll ever make. As always, we invite your feedback. Let us know what you think in the comments, or hit us up using our contact info below.

And as always, you can follow us on Twitter at Twitter.com/strutta.

In December, we launched our Do-It-Yourself online contest platform. Since then, we've been fielding a lot of requests from clients looking for help with designing and customizing contests, or incorporating contests into their existing marketing mix.

We simply can't keep up. Demand is out-pacing what we can deliver on, and the product is already at a state where fulfillment on these requests can come from other sources.

The Strutta platform is multi-faceted. There is the online solution, which itself is quite extinsible and customizable, and then there is the pending API, which will help put the control in the hands of developers to repurpose as they see fit.

While we work with developers to prepare the API, we have demand for CSS designers too. The online DIY contests still need to deft hands of a CSS designer to make them unique for each client, and we've made the process relatively simple. Ask us about how you can use our style kit to build contests that match existing client websites, or create your own original designs.

We're hoping to team up with a number of trusted partners to help us fulfill many of these requests. Put simply, we may have some work for you, so if you're interested or have questions, please get in touch so we can talk specifics by using info[at]strutta.com.

*img: "Help Wanted" by Egan Snow on Flickr.

Since we launched the Strutta online contest software, we've used it to buid a number of cool contests. The really exciting thing is that now, people are realizing how easy is it to use themselves, and are doing some pretty neat things with it.

We thought we'd share a few great examples here, and a few tips about how to accomplish such coolness for yourself.

PopVox Awards

Pushing the boundaries of the software farthest is the PopVoX Awards, New Media BC's annual awards for all things digitial media in BC. With 23 categories and featuring BC's finest, PopVoXAwards.com is worth taking a peek at, and since it's only just underway, you can still cast your votes.

Pictured at right is the PopVox Awards home page design by Mod7. The configuration of the site itself was handled by Fuse Interactive.

Ski and Shoot Sunshine

Sunshine Village in Banff is holding an exciting contest for fans of the ski resort, and the list of prizes is truly awesome.

The entries in the contest are awe-inspiring, with so many jaw dropping images, and they're all generating plenty of votes and comments. Anyone can enter, and if you look carefully at the prizes, it's easy to narrow in on the one you want to win and dominate it. The entries deserve your votes, so give 'em some love. Visit Contest.SkiBanff.com

*Pictured at right is a photo called "Sunshine Heaven." Click through to vote for it.

ProtectTheTest.com

Every year in Squamish, a most epic mountain bike race is held. The Test of Metal is world reknowned, and now the course has been threatened. Tourism Squamish wants to save the land that the course in held on, and worked with VentureWeb of Squamish to build this contest, which also serves as an awareness campaign.

Check it out, cast your votes and tell your Test of Metal stories. Squamish would sure appreciate it.

Pictured at right is an entry entitled "I love the Test of Metal." Click through to vote for it.

The contests serve as great examples fo what's possible, but they don;t represent thelimit of what can be done, especially with the front-end design of the sites. If you're a CSS designer and you'd like to take a stab at amking soemthing terrific with our software, let us know! We'd love to see what you come up with.

If you comments of questions, feel free to use the form below.

The best way to incorporate a Strutta contest as part of your site is to create a domain C-name.

In this example, we're going to create the Cname "contest" at www.exampledomain.com. When the settings are correct, our fictional contest should reside at http://contest.exampledomain.com. Every domain registrar has specific directions as to how to accomplish this domain change, and Google provides a list of instructions for many of them at the bottom of this page.

For the sake of this example, we'll use the specific instructions for GoDaddy, a popular domain registrar. Keep in mind for that for this to work, your DNS settings need to be pointing to your domain regsistrar itself (like it is by default when you buy it), or your domain needs to have an A-record or be CNAME'd already at the top level. Still with us? Great.

1. Log in to your account at www.godaddy.com.
2. Open the Domains tab and select My Domain Names. You'll be directed to the Domain Manager page.
3. Click the domain that you'd like to use with Strutta.
4. Click the Total DNS Control And MX Records in the box entitled Total DNS Control.
   Note: Adding entries to the Manage Subdomains section does not create a CNAME record.
5. Click Add New CNAME Record. If you've already created a CNAME record for the address, click the marker icon under the Actions column next to the existing CNAME record.
6. In the box that reads "Enter an Alias name," enter: contest.
7. In the "Points to Host Name" box, enter: hosted.strutta.com. Keep the TTL setting as the default.
8. Click OK. In the Review and status box, you can see the results of your updates.

The changes won't take effect immediately, but will before too long. If your settings in your Strutta account are set correcty, then once the change has taken effect, our example contest would be live at http://contest.exampledomain.com.

We understand that the preceeding directions can be incredibly confusing, especially if it's the first time you've ever made changes to your domain's DNS settings. It can be downright daunting. If you need a hand, hit us up at the feedback link on the top left, or using the contact info at the bottom of this page.