Pepsi Max has unveiled its first ever global brand campaign which sets to underline ‘Genius’ in a series of videos and experiences.
The socially-led global campaign was launched with the premiere of 'Drone Football' - the first of the content-led push which sees a group of friends play their weekly five-a-side match in a tech-heavy arena.
Offering a glimpse of the future of football, the pitch was transformed with over 30,000 reactive LED lights installed into the surrounding landscape and a futuristic drone referee who even handed out yellow cards for rough play.
Kristin Patrick, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of PepsiCo global beverage brands, said: “We believe that the most exciting experiences don’t just happen - they’re created. The ‘Genius' campaign will show experiences that are elevated and made more exciting when something unexpected happens.
“In the case of 'Drone Football,' our first TV and digital ad under this new campaign, we’ve taken something that’s already exciting - a pickup game of football among friends - and elevated it by adding in surprising twists, like a drone that delivers a unique football, and light effects that at first surprise the footballers and then make their game even more exciting than it might have been."
Sebastian Micozzi, head of marketing and innovation at PepsiCo, added: “Pepsi Max now accounts for more than half of the brand's value in the UK, an achievement that was down to a rigourous and innovative digital marketing approach.
“We are hugely excited to be a part of the global 'Genius' platform launch - a campaign that we know will build on the success of last year through the creation of exciting digital content that provides consumers with entertaining moments and ingenious new experiences.”
The slot was directed by Scott Lyon and was captured in Barcelona with local players. The series be broadcast both digital and through traditional TV viewing.
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.
