Pepsi has always been on-trend with its ability to gauge the pulse of the youth. To keep up with the emerging GenZ, Pepsi launched its new brand philosophy of SWAG in 2019. It stands for being as cool as ICE (Irreverence, Confidence and Effortlessness) which exactly matched the wavelength of our youth.

But while this shift made people love us, we needed them to crave us which we were still unable to do due to a dominant consumer perception of Pepsi not being as ‘strong’ and so not as refreshing as the other cola-carbonates.

To change this perception, we modified Pepsi’s formulation by adding more fizz! The fizz made Pepsi stronger and thus more refreshing, giving rise to our new proposition - ‘more fizz, more refreshing’.

But just changing our formulation wasn’t enough.

We needed to drive awareness about this change in a relevant yet effective way among the youth.

To tap into nostalgia, we first needed to find a shared memory with our consumers to bring to life. For that, we looked to our brand ambassador, Salman Khan, who has been a Bollywood superstar for more than 25 years. We decided to bring back one his most iconic characters that holds a special place in every Indian’s heart – Prem.

Pepsi disrupted the category, re-creating the iconic character of Prem by leveraging ultra-hi-tech deepfake technology, a first for any Indian television commercial.

Our TVC staged an epic crossover between Prem and the real Salman to show his decades’ long journey! The narrative drew parallels between Salman’s trajectory and that of Pepsi highlighting how they had both evolved over the course of time to remain relevant and maintain their iconic status.

Our campaign was a highly ambitious tech-led endeavor that was contingent upon bringing the younger version of our brand ambassador, Salman Khan, to life. We achieved this feat by partnering with one of the best VFX studios in the world, Metropolitana Spain. The studio used ultra-hi-tech deepfake technology in the post-production process, extracting the younger Salman’s face from his old videos and aligned it onto the face of an actor standing in as the young Salman during the shoot. The technique created a composite version of Salman whose expressions could be manipulated which was used to match the dubbed audio with the VFX generated face to create the perfect dynamic deepfake video.

Business Impact:

 Post the campaign, Pepsi’s sales grew by 27% from 2021

 We garnered media reach of 87 MM and PR value of INR 69 MM.

Consumer perception:

We saw a spike across various consumer perception scores from Q4’21 TO Q2’22 including a -

• 7.2% increase in ‘taste’ (13.2% increase over coke)

• 10.2 % spike in the ‘refreshment’ (17% increase over coke)

• 6.7% spike in the ‘youth’ scores (10% increase over Coke)

Social Metrics:

 YouTube Metrics -

• 90.9 million total impressions

• 23.1 million reach

• 32 million views

 3 million views on Instagram