Pepsi's plan to use DJs to market their sodas and Reebok's "I Am What I Am" campaign featuring a controversial spot with 50 Cent are especially interesting recent examples of the use of hip hop in advertising.

While following hip hop business news at ProHipHop, I've been especially interested in the use of hip hop for marketing purposes. As hip hop has gone mainstream, rap music is increasingly used to market products not directly associated with the genre.

Pepsi and niche marketing agency RPM recently announced a campaign in which club and radio djs will promote Pepsi. The three-month summer campaign sounds really smart and is "expected to include New York's DJ Enuff and L.A.'s Eric Cubiche. They will serve as 'soda ambassadors,' touting the soda via on-air mentions, club events, photo shoots, block parties, Pepsi-sponsored mix tapes and cross-promotions with brands such as Launch and T-Mobile."

The use of mixtapes is especially interesting given that mixtapes are crossing over from an underground marketing technique to a mainstream approach, with releases from major artists being touted as mixtapes and artists' backstories including mixtapes as a base for career building, as in the case of 50 Cent. RPM is headed by Rene McLean who previously worked for Elektra and Interscope. They're responsible for the Mixshow Power Summit that gathers major players in hip hop, most recently in San Juan, Puerto Rico where Lyor Cohen gave the keynote.

The Mixshow Summit press release describes the RPM Group as an "innovator in the field of urban lifestyle, marketing, radio promotions, product placement, event planning and creative services for companies targeting the urban market." They also have serious connections with the artists which is key to succeeding in the use of hip hop for marketing purposes. However, they need to consider search engine optimization cause I gave up on finding their site after searching and discovering multiple marketing groups with RPM in the title, none of them connected with Rene McLean, and a company called the RPM Group that's focused on auto parts. Very weak online strategy but surprisingly commonplace.

Pepsi didn't do so well with the Ludacris/O'Reilly incident, a major misstep in which they dropped Ludacris and picked up Ozzy Osbourne, whose drug addled behavior on "reality" television show somehow made him a better candidate, and then were pressured into a big payout for the non-profit Ludacris Foundation. But they certainly weren't scared off from the use of hip hop to market their still no. 2 product and ran a P. Diddy Superbowl spot that tied for popularity with a cat killer ad among 14 to 24 year olds. Note that the ad was for Diet Pepsi at a time when both Coke and Pepsi are focusing more on diet drinks, i.e. hip hop is being featured in a Pepsi campaign that is crucial to their future.

Not everyone grasps what's up with hip hop and marketing. Adrants, one of my favorite business blogs, made fun of the upcoming Pepsi dj campaign using a parody of African-American slang and speech patterns that will only anger me if I discuss it more fully. Let's just say I've seen it many times by people that just can't believe that hip hop has crossed over to the mainstream and don't seem to be able to keep up with such developments, though that's not necessarily the situation with Adrants. In any case, I'm trying to learn to not share my anger so freely. That's right, you'll have to pay for pure expressions of my righteous anger from now on!