Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast featured a compelling use of crowdsourcing. To promote its halftime show, Pepsi incorporated thousands of photos submitted by customers as part of its video introduction welcoming Beyonce to the stage. The promotion serves as another interesting example of the growing crowdsourcing phenomenon, which continues to generate innovative new business and marketing approaches.

“Long used by forward-looking companies, crowdsourcing has become more popular as more businesses use it to quickly get results for crucial projects, such as designing trucks, building predictive models, improving customer service and designing Super Bowl halftime shows,” explains the Wall Street Journal.

The mass adoption of social media has made crowdsourcing more mainstream and companies of all sizes are becoming less hesitant to experiment with the technique.

“In general, the widest range of input on a subject is going to give you the better result,” suggests Gartner analyst Carol Rozwell, who notes that people are now more inclined to contribute to public projects due to the increase in social media.

“Some large companies whose employees are widely distributed use crowdsourcing to foster idea pooling,” writes WSJ. “Some of Fidelity Investments 40,000 employees use Spigit, an application that allows them to exchange and vote on ideas on improving customer service for retirement planning and processing trades.”

“It gives us a great opportunity to tap into the entire firm’s brains,” suggests Sean Belka, SVP and director of the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology.

Peter Diamandis founded the X Prize Foundation for crowdsourcing tech competitions. He believes customers can serve as thought leaders to help create content, products and services.

“In March, the Singularity University Mr. Diamandis co-founded to educate business leaders about emerging technologies will host a program to teach senior executives from Google, PepsiCo, The Dow Chemical Co. and other companies on how crowdsourcing is changing the dynamics of business,” notes the article.

If you missed the video intro to Beyonce during Sunday’s game, visit the Pepsi Halftime Frame By Frame site.