Background: Expo 2020 Dubai had been cancelled and delayed due to COVID. Expo was set to be the first global multi-cultural conference of scale since many have experienced lockdown in their respective countries and cities. We worked with Pepsico strategizing through their short and long-term sustainability goals, upcoming global programs, and road mapping what this Expo exhibit would come to mean for the brand, as they expand into new regions with new products

Objective: To create three brand experience pavilions, lasting 6 months, that represented each theme of Expo, to be architectural, modern, interactive, educational, engaging, strictly sustainable, and easily portable (to go on a multi-city roadshow). As well as nurture wellness with government-sanctioned safety protocols throughout all experiences.

Aquafina’s ‘The Drop’ pavilion stood out to be a clear beacon of sustainability and humanitarian power in its experiential programming, messaging, and impact.

We invested in the logistics, details, and technology; how the systems operated in the back end, ensuring efficiencies, and physical power/sustainable materials to last 6 months. Aquafina’s ‘The Drop’ pavilion turned digital drops of interaction into hope and action. The physical structure was designed to look like a giant droplet and constructed from 41,000 recyclable aluminum cans - educating visitors on water sustainability in food and agriculture, and inspiring individual conservation efforts. Also highlighting PepsiCo's efforts to help farmers worldwide with sustainable water practices, smart use of water in manufacturing, and the brand's innovative efforts to reduce, recycle, and reinvent packaging. A high-tech experience with “Aquatar”: the 3D water AI encyclopedia with global facts on the human body’s relationship to water had guests transformed into water particles displayed on a larger-than-life curved projection wall. The pavilion also offered refillable water bottles and stations that created new water flavors on tap.

The pavilions were for the world stage, but above all for the UAE community – the sustainability initiatives were directly for the region’s introduction, permeation, and benefit – a communal love letter to Dubai based on our collective global citizenship to the environment. . Our experiential programming reached both local and global communities, while highlighting the innovation that powers PepsiCo’s BrandStory into the future across many of their marquee brands. : There were multiple challenges, beginning with the global pandemic recalibrating our design strategy for each pavilion. It was imperative that we not only deliver an engaging experience but one that upheld safety protocols for our audiences. We danced with many other circumstances – from sandstorms to extreme heat, and weather variations, which reworked our build and Expo launch schedules.

The pavilions logged many hours of development: 6,032 hours for Aquafina, 5,815 for Gatorade, and 5,943 for Pepsi/Lay’s. The 6-month display time frame also granted us a unique opportunity to create deeply interactive, gamified, educational experiences that offered attendees resources around the possibilities for supporting our planet earth. They were created to be mobile, so they could potentially be transported to other communities across the world. All high price items like steel, aluminum, gypsum, concrete, blocks were procured regionally within 500kms of the Project site, with a strong preference for items that already had recycled content in them. Rapidly renewable materials like bamboo, rubber, or agrifiber products, had a strict harvest cycle of 10 or fewer years.

Each pavilion was designed around core Expo themes of Mobility (The Bolt: Gatorade), Sustainability (The Drop: Aquafina), and Opportunity (The Plus: Pepsi Black + Lays), with the project resulting in 246 million global media impressions. Expo 2020 Dubai was open for 6 months, welcoming over 50 million people. The Aquafina pavilion landed in Assouline’s ‘Architecture Site Themes’, lauded as an dynamic architectural marvel of sustainability. The successful exhibition also increased brand visibility over 147%, driving new interest in PepsiCo in the UAE region and driving us to a secondary collaboration with the brand, launching one of the first energy drinks in the UAE from the PepsiCo portfolio – and this is just the beginning.