Pepsi sought to promote its Zero Sugar product and rouse football fans to watch the start of the new season at home with a 24 August NFL activation in the USA called ‘Football Is Calling’.
In a nutshell, the VaynerMedia-created campaign urges fans to stay inside, watch NFL games and drink Pepsi Zero Sugar.
Running under the soft drinks giant’s ongoing ‘Made For Football Watching’ platform, the pre-season tongue-in-cheek commercial starring Billions and Breaking Bad actor David Costabile sees friends at a watch party start to trickle out to do other activities being stopped by the actor who gives a rousing speech about the necessity of staying inside. Costabile admits that people have been cooped up for nearly two years and are missing social connections, but states that football as a ritual that can’t be missed.
The campaign is led by a hero spot which broke on 24 August and rolls out with national television commercials and digital content all featuring Costabile and the creative draws on Costabile’s acting gravitas to echo the motivational speeches of famous US sports movies such as ‘Any Given Sunday’ and ‘Remember the Titans’.
The work is all based on the idea that while the world is calling, football is calling too and your friends are counting on you to sit on that couch and watch five games at once for 12 hours straight. It encourages them not to let their friends down and suggests they ‘grab a Pepsi, throw on some cozy clothes, and get ready for the season’.
The campaign also sees Pepsi announce a fresh partnership with NFLShop.com with a $1m league-branded merchandise giveaway through October. Specially marked cases of its drinks will carry QR codes on-pack which, when unlocked, points to be put toward official gear from the 32 league teams or weekly sweepstakes offering a variety of prizes – including a trip for two to Super Bowl LVI.
“Now that fall schedules are beginning to fill up, we felt it was important to remind everyone to unapologetically prioritize their football watching time – even if it comes at the expense of social or household obligations,” explained Pepsi Marketing VP Todd Kaplan. “No matter where you find yourself this season, we’re encouraging fans to celebrate their love of countless hours of football—and to do so with a Pepsi in hand, decked out in their favourite team gear.”
The activation was created for a Pepsi team which included CEO Kirk Tanner, CMO Greg Lyons, VP Marketing Todd Kaplan, Senior Marketing Director JP Bittencourt, Marketing Director Rich Funaoka, Marketing Manager Catherine Carter, by agency VaynerMedia and production company Bucket Films.
Comment:
Pepsi is using the return of football to promote Pepsi Zero Sugar to men in their 30s and 40s and it plan to run more than a dozen spots for Pepsi Zero Sugar around the NFL season as it steps up its battle with Coke’s zero-sugar variant (which recently launched an extensive campaign centred on a product reformulation).
Pepsi is a longstanding primary NFL partner (it became the league’s official soft-drink sponsor in 2011 and the Super Bowl halftime sponsor in 2012) and its latest activation builds buzz and excitement ahead of the 2021/22 football season. Whilst it doesn’t directly address the pandemic, it does makes clear references to the prolonged period during which fans have had to spend so much time at home and the opportunities now for stepping back out into the world.
Yet, somewhat counterintuitively, this campaign’s message suggests that remaining at home to the sofa is some sort of admirable sacred football duty.
The campaign’s PR material cites Nielsen research which found football fans remained loyal to the sport in 2020 and watched NFL games at three times the rate as other primetime programming. But during that period there were stringent Covid-19 restrictions in place. Indeed, NFL ratings for the 2020 regular season were still down 7% compared to the year prior according to Nielsen
But more recent sports TV audience statistics show a decline in watching. For example, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics suffered a 42% ratings dip compared to the 2016 Rio Games.
The NFL retains a powerful hold on linear TV viewership, but as media continues to fragment an increasing number of viewers are cutting the TV cord and Pepsi is trying to hold on to as many as possible – particularly as fans emerge from the pandemic lockdowns.
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