The Truth About The Soda Machines At South By Southwest

jdlasica via FlickerSXSW is held in the Austin Convention Center

South by Southwest, an annual tech and music conference in Austin Texas, is in full swing. And there's something funny about soda machines at the Austin Convention Center, where 40,000 people have flocked to listen to panels.

They're all Pepsi machines.

But two weeks ago, they were all Coke machines.

What happened? Pepsi is a major South by Southwest advertiser, and it pays gobs of money to remove all of the Coke machines and replace them with its own stands all throughout Austin.

A South by Southwest employee tells us Pepsi ran the same sponsorship last year, and his team started swapping out the soda machines for Pepsi's campaign last week.

The employee wasn't sure how much Pepsi paid, but he assured us it was "a ton."

Alyson Shontell/Business InsiderOne of the many Pepsi machines in the Austin Convention Center for SXSW.