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Pepsi | This is the Pepsi

Pepsi was bringing back the 1978 can we all fell in love with and they needed a campaign to launch it. Unfortunately Kendall-Gate had just happened a few months earlier and everyone hated Pepsi. It was our job to make America like Pepsi again. Easy right?

We created "This is the Pepsi," a campaign that nodded to the generations of people (past, present and even future) who have loved Pepsi and still love it. And it all started 10 minutes in the briefing meeting when I jotted down “This is the can that your father drank. And his father drank, with someone who is not your grandmother.”

Once we finished the edit. The brand loved it so much they decided the Super Bowl was their chance at redemption. They launched the anthem spot in a :30 national spot before kickoff. It didn’t win the Ad Meter not that it would’ve, because it wasn’t created for the Super Bowl. But it was the highest performing Pepsi ad the brand has ever tested (which has only beaten by an NFL campaign I sold through which was later shelved 2 weeks before shoot). The rest of the campaign rolled out immediately after. And then the global teams saw it, fell in love and filmed their own unique versions to roll out into their respective markets.

And then I wrote some radio. Unfortunately we couldn’t get Jimmy Fallon again as the VO because of budget restrictions so we had to go the fun non-union route.

And of course every campaign today needs a massive amount of supporting social assets. The “This is the Pepsi” ramp line gave us a nice way of tailoring all social assets to particular audiences based off ad placement.

I designed these limited edition screen prints from retro Pepsi ads that were given to influencers along with the heritage can and some other swag.

And once all the bottlers and CMOs fell in love with the campaign it got rolled out globally across every market. Below are two spots created off of the brand bible we wrote for “This is the Pepsi”