After a difficult 2020 NFL Season, Pepsi wanted to find a way to reunite Football fans with their favorite teams and game day rituals, as well as take Football-watching experience at home to the next level.
Continuing from the success of Pepsi's 2020 Made For Football Watching Campaign, one of the most popular COVID friendly activations for at home fans was their recipe content. Pepsi fans literally ate. it. up.
To capitalize on this momentum, in 2021 Pepsi gave us these specific goals:
- Deliver a unique AR Experience where consumers can *make* their favorite local game-day recipes with a player
- Create an experience that can be updated weekly (minimum of 8 Weeks)
- Focus on Pepsi recipes, but leverage Pepsi's roster of NFL athletes
- Drive recipe downloads
- Fit the AR experience seamlessly into the overall Made For Football Watching Campaign
At the center of Pepsi's Made For Football Watching (MFFW) Campaign was the team-specific microsites where Pepsi hosted their exclusive prizing, digital content, and recipe content.
With QR Codes on Pepsi Packaging and digital content driving users to the team-specific microsites, our plan was to develop an AR Experience that fit seamlessly into these microsites, and could be accessed two ways:
1. The MFFW team microsites (mobile & desktop optimized w/QR Codes)
2. Paid Media assets that drove consumers directly to the AR Experience
The incentive of exclusive prizing was also a strong draw to get consumers to return to the microsites (2x on avg). To encourage fans to engage with the AR, the featured recipes in each experience were updated weekly. For example: in Week 1, Jets fans could cook Pepsi BBQ Sauce with Mekhi Becton, but in Week 2, fans could now cook Pepsi Glazed Ribs with Mekhi.
Additionally, the experience included an ‘add to cart’ feature for recipe ingredients to drive conversions at local supermarkets, a downloadable recipe card for those shopping in-person, and a photo opportunity to ‘pose-with-the-pros’ and share your finished recipe.
We worked with 8 NFL teams and 1 player from each team to introduce delicious recipes in your own home. Each athlete was then integrated into one of the largest AR campaigns ever launched to date. Each carefully crafted recipe uses Pepsi as one of its main ingredients and every meal was Made for Football Watching.
Through this immersive AR experience, fans took photos with their favorite player, then downloaded each recipe card, driving them to supermarket retailers to purchase all ingredients for an unbelievably delicious Pepsi inspired meal.
With amazing talent and delicious recipes Pepsi gave fans the ultimate home experience and the results were truly incredible
Fans loved the experience, and the results were just as great as the recipes themselves.
National Level
The MFFW Campaign exceeded the estimated number of registrants by 686% (4.39MM registrants) and total entries by 3.6% (19.2MM)
Pepsi’s North Division
1.1MM site users (+465% YOY)
256K Entries
218% increase in engagements on the sites
1.01M site users
1:40 average site duration
14.8 entries/user (higher than the national average of 9.2)
Augmented Reality
72,000 Total Events (clicks, touches etc.)
23,000 Users
5,000 Photo Engagements
2,000 Recipe Downloads
:27 Average Session Duration
