Pepsi: Super bowl halftime

Challenge: Before halftime of each Super Bowl, Pepsi airs their most prominent ad of the year. But for the Super Bowl XLVII halftime show featuring Beyonce, rather than just create a TV spot, Pepsi challenged us to come up with a new way to drive engagement with the brand.

Insight and Idea: Pepsi is at the center of pop culture and their customers love to showcase their engagement with the brand. So we set out to create the first fan-made Super Bowl halftime introduction ad. We ran an integrated TV, digital, social, OOH and influencer campaign that drove more than 120,000 user-generated photo submissions that were stitched together to tell a story. Through a partnership with Beyonce and her team, the ad seamlessly transitioned to the start of her halftime show, the first halftime ad to ever do so.

Results: After the game, we drove fans to pepsi.com to watch the ad frame-by-frame and hunt for easter eggs, leading to average time on site of over 4:30. The campaign helped create buzz and excitement around Pepsi six weeks prior to the Super Bowl and long after it as well, driving over 5.5 billion impressions worldwide between paid, earned and owned media. The campaign helped Pepsi’s brand sentiment briefly surpass Coca Cola's for the first time in history and won an Effie award.