Usher is working on what will likely be the biggest video of his career. As part of a Pepsi Challenge campaign that kicks off Tuesday, the singer will incorporate his fans in the project in two different ways.
Beginning Tuesday through June 2, fans can submit photos of themselves toPepsiChallenge.com. Usher will select a winner who will have the opportunity to meet him on the set of his accompanying short film to be released this fall. Usher asks entrants to, “Show me your world through your eyes in only a way that you can see it. The realer, the better. The more honest, the more creative.”
Usher and Pepsi have teamed withUrtheCast, the world’s first full color ultra high-definition cameras located on the International Space Station (ISS), to film footage of the pop star’s fans across the globe. Part of the recordings will be incorporated into a short.
“I wanted to do something very unique that would actually cover the globe, we are actually going to cover the entire planet,” Usher told Yahoo Music during an exclusive interview. “I wanted something that would definitely push the limits.”
Usher is excited about using the UrtheCast technology. “UrtheCast was something that was just that next level that was beyond any of our imaginations,” Usher said. “We all have an idea of what space looks like but we haven’t really seen it through the eyes of this camera that is streaming live through space.”
The short will feature Usher’s new song “Miracles.” A clip of the song is used as background music for the “Without You” singer’s Pepsi Challenge video.
Usher’s excitement about the project recalls memories of one of pop music’s biggest video moments. “I remember the first time I saw Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ how excited I was,” he said. “It’s going to be amazing, like a piece of history.”
One thing Pepsi never did with its original Pepsi Challenge was alter the design of its iconic can. But it’s a whole new world now, and even the Pepsi container is no longer off limits.
In fact, in the new version of the Pepsi Challenge, the brand is giving consumers the “extraordinary opportunity to re-envision” the can with their own designs in the “Live For Now” Design Challenge, according to a PepsiCo press release.
The company has been promising a whole raft of culturally relevant, digitally oriented initiatives under the Pepsi Challenge for the rest of the year, since itlaunched a revival of the themeof its old taste-test campaign in March.
The can design challenge follows the Pepsi x Liter of Light “Ignite the Light” tour in which world-renowned fashion designer and creative directorNicola Formichetti—who rose to fame as thestylistwho helped catapult Lady Gaga to fame—is challenging individuals to design art installations inspired by light.
In line with PepsiCo’s corporate commitment to “performance with purpose,” the campaign has a pro-social element. Using the #PepsiChallenge hashtag will also trigger a $1 donation by the company to Liter of Light, which will help bring environmentally-friendly, inexpensive and easy-to-produce lights to underdeveloped areas.
Formichetti is leading the charge to inspire all customers, not just designers and creatives, to digitally apply their own designs to a blank Pepsi can, with the only stipulation that the logo must be intact.
Pepsi will accept submissions through May 13, at which point a judging panel that includes PepsiCo’s chief design officer Mauro Porcini will help determine the winning can design.
“We wanted one of our first global challenges to connect with this bold creative class directly,” Kristin Patrick, SVP and CMO of Pepsi, stated in the release.
“We’re turning over our most cherished piece of equity and our most visible piece of real estate—the facade of the Pepsi can—to consumers around the world to reimagine,” added Patrick. “We can’t wait to see the results.”
Below, watch how Formichetti kicked off the Pepsi Challenge creative program with a “Liter of Light” art installation in Hong Kong: Click here to view
Pepsi wants to sell you a feeling, with a little soda on the side.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the soda giant's famous "Pepsi Challenge" campaign, which asked people to do a blind taste test to see if they preferred Pepsi or Coke. To celebrate, the company isre-launching the challenge, complete with celebrities like Usher and Serena Williams, as well as Vine and Snapchat sensation Jerome Jarre. But instead of picking Pepsi or Coke, the new campaign asks fans to take part in sports, tech, design and music challenges.
The modernized challenge isn’t completely devoid of images of Pepsi cans, and there will be a taste test component in some markets. But the ad push centers largely around creating an emotional connection with the Pepsi brand and less on lauding the taste of its cola.
That's because the company's ethos is about more than just a bubbly drink, said Brad Jakeman, the president of PepsiCo's Global Beverages Group.
“This is a brand that has stood next to major cultural moments all around the world; it’s a brand that always operates in the consumer zeitgeist,” Jakeman said. “The brand is much bigger than a product concept, and actually that has allowed us to do a lot of interesting things with this brand beyond soda.”
It makes sense for Pepsi to minimize the campaign's focus on soda because the sugary, carbonated drink isfalling out of fashion. Americans in particular are opting more often for energy drinks and enhanced waters as the nation becomes more health-conscious. PepsiCo’s snack division, Frito-Lay,has helped buoy the companyamid sluggish soda sales in recent years.
The decline in millions of liters of soda sold in the U.S.
The Pepsi Challenge was first imagined as a direct provocation to the company's main rival, Coke. At the time, Coke was a big-time national brand, while Pepsi was mostly popular regionally. As a result, Pepsi had to focus on innovations -- plastic two-liter bottles and aggressive marketing -- to make a dent in Coke’s lead, according to former Pepsi CEO John Sculley.
“Everything that I was expected to do at Pepsi was about competition with Coca-Cola,” said Sculley, who is also the author ofMoonshot! Game-Changing Strategies to Build Billion-Dollar Businesses.
Forty years later, that strategy doesn’t make sense in a world where Coke isn’t Pepsi’s main problem. Now, changing tastes and smaller upstarts offering a wide array of alternatives to soda are some of the biggest threats to the company.
“If you’re Pepsi, you have to do something,” said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “Trends are not going their way.”
This isn’t a problem unique to Pepsi. Legacy companies like McDonald’s and Coke are also searching for ways to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling about their brands even as shoppers eschew their products.Coke’s Super Bowl campaignencouraged viewers to make the Internet a more positive place by adding the hashtag “Make It Happy” to negative tweets, which flagged a bot to turn the text into cute cartoon images. McDonald’s also courted controversy after the chain releasedan ad highlighting messageslike “thank you veterans” and “keep jobs in Toledo” that franchisees often feature on the signs outside their restaurants.
“What you’re seeing now is less emphasis on the product because they find themselves in this situation where the product itself is not that appealing,” said Denise Lee Yohn, a brand consultant who has worked with Burger King, New Balance and other top companies.
It’s hard to say whether creating a halo around a brand actually translates into selling more soda or burgers, Calkins said. It's easier to track the impact of old-school promotion tactics, like giving out coupons, than campaigns based on social media.
Now, the company will wait and see what kind of success it can have with a Pepsi Challenge that relies heavily on people liking it enough to tweet about it or talk about it on Facebook. “The challenge is can they come with something that’s really compelling," Calkins said.
Forget the blind taste tests that pitted Pepsi against Coke, a hallmark of the classic, wildly successful advertising campaign that made its debut 40 years ago. This time, Pepsi has signed a crowd of celebrities, including Usher, Serena Williams and Usain Bolt, to recruit consumers to participate in a series of challenges meant for the social media generation. The yearlong promotion begins on Wednesday.
“We’ve taken the DNA of the Pepsi challenge, then reinterpreted it for a new generation,” said Brad Jakeman, president of PepsiCo’s global beverages group. “Now more than ever, we are in a world where the consumer expects to hear from the brands they love in whole different ways.”
Every month, Pepsi “ambassadors” will use social media to issue a new challenge — many of which blend social responsibility with popular culture — that encourages consumers to “do something different.” Later this month, for instance, the fashion designer Nicola Formichetti will present the first challenge from Hong Kong to bring light to poor communities across the globe using plastic Pepsi bottles filled with water and bleach to refract sunlight.
All the challenges will focus on social media in some way, and they could involve technology, music or sports. Over the summer, the singer Usher will participate in a video that involves footage from space. (No, PepsiCo executives said, they are not sending Usher into orbit.)
James RodrÃguez, the soccer star; Ms. Williams, the tennis champion; and Mr. Bolt, the Olympic sprinter, will also present challenges, presumably of the athletic variety. Pepsi has also signed on Jerome Jarre, a name that people over the age of 30 may not recognize but who is a bona fide star on the social networks Vine and Snapchat.
Reviving the Pepsi Challenge represents an effort by the brand to stand out by exploiting the mass recognition of a previously successful idea. Other marketers and media companies also have deployed a similar strategy, bringing back characters and ideas with built-in recognition. Pepsi’s archrival, Coca-Cola, for instance, recently announced a new yearlong campaign to celebrate thehundredth anniversaryof its iconic bottle.
And there are, of course, the movie-franchise sequels that now dominate the box office.
Yet the approach comes with a risk: that the remake of a retro idea doesn’t live up to the hype of the past. “You don’t want to milk the equity,” Mr. Jakeman said. “You actually want to add to it.”
Mr. Jakeman added that it was easier to stand out with big, bold advertising campaigns years ago, before the age of commercial skipping and the proliferation of social media. “All you had to do was make a television commercial,” he said. “It is not about one big epic television commercial anymore. It is about this continuing dialogue.”
The new advertisements come as Pepsi is aiming to expand its global presence, particularly in emerging markets. A major part of the new Pepsi Challenge involves bringing a local perspective to the global campaign and creating individual and distinct campaigns region by region.
The plan, which represents a broader push across the marketing industry, is a recognition of the global nature of the Internet but it also takes regional cultural differences into consideration.
Pepsi, for example, will challenge consumers in India to create their own Pepsi ads that could be shown during this year’s Indian Premier League cricket games, which are sponsored, as it so happens, by Pepsi. There are also plans for a music challenge in Latin America and a food-related challenge in Thailand.
“The context in which consumers live really mandated for us as a brand to be as locally relevant as possible,” said Carla Hassan, PepsiCo’s chief marketing officer for the Middle East and Africa region. “There are cultural differences and also behavioral differences. We want to make sure we’re being respectful to the cultural norms.”
One challenge Pepsi plans to introduce in several countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon, will ask consumers to record the sounds around them — the shouts of fruit vendors or clangs of construction, for instance — and upload them to the Pepsi Challenge website or through a mobile app developed specifically for the region. A celebrity producer will use them to create a compilation of various sounds.
“At the end of the day, people connect with things that are really personal to them,” Ms. Hassan said.
Like a wave of other brands today, Pepsi is also using the ad campaign to appeal to the millennial generation’s sense of responsibility to give back. Every time consumers use the hashtag #PepsiChallenge on their social media profiles, Pepsi will donate $1 to the Liter of Light organization, which has provided sustainable lighting to more than 18 countries, including Kenya and Colombia.
Millennials have embraced these types of click-driven, purpose-driven campaigns — the Ice Bucket Challenge, for example, exploded on the Internet last summer — but it’s not clear whether people will be as eager to support a corporate challenge.
