In Australia, only 3% of people prefer Pepsi over Coke. This means that when it comes to choosing a drink with a meal, almost all Australians default to Coke. But the flavour profile of Pepsi Max is proven to make food taste better - meaning Australia needed to know that by defaulting to Coke with their meals, they were missing out. So our brief was simple - find a cheeky, disruptive way to share the facts, with the aim to make Australians reconsider their drink choices when eating a meal. But to do it, we had to consider the considerable brand and legal backlash, making sure to toe the line between what was permissible on public and private property, considerable road-worthiness issues for the vehicle, weather and safety constraints.

Research showed that when given the choice, people preferred the taste of Pepsi over Coke with their meals. But all the major chains in Australia serve Coke. So, knowing we couldn’t get Pepsi Max inside these Coke-affiliated restaurants, we instead targeted the roadside - going after these iconic roadside restaurant signs to create a new message.

We decked out a Pepsi Max van, added a very large hydraulic pole, and placed a sign of our own on top with five simple words - “Tastes Better with Pepsi Max” We then drove our van right up to the established roadside signs, and raised our sign to create a new message - “Mcdonald’s tastes better with Pepsi Max.” and “Hungry Jack’s tastes better with Pepsi Max”. In effect, we hijacked their iconic signs to deliver a message about the superior taste of Pepsi Max.

Australia’s biggest fast food chains serve Coke. As a result, most people - over 95% - don’t even consider pairing their meal with a Pepsi.

So, in order to break Australia’s Coke habit, we had to show up somewhere we weren’t ever supposed to be, with a message most Australians had never even heard.

That’s why we chose to go take our message to the people who most needed to hear it - those eating meals with an inferior cola at Coke-affiliated restaurants.

Knowing we couldn’t get Pepsi Max inside these Coke-affiliated restaurants, we instead targeted the roadside - targeting their iconic roadside signs to create a message of our own.

To enable quick set up and getaway, we decked out a Pepsi Max branded van with a military grade hydraulic sign that could be raised and lowered in under a minute. We then scoped out the most visible, iconic roadside signs we could find, and turned up ready to deliver our message.

For maximum impact, our campaign launched on International Burger Day, 2023.

By using the signs of the restaurants serving our competition to deliver our message, this activation created an entirely new kind of placement. This stunt specifically targeted the well known, iconic roadside signs in order to deliver our message in an innovative and provocative way.

The stunts were supported by online films to help scale the campaign to a larger audience.

We set out to shake things up in the cola market and convince those who tend to pair Coke with their meals, to dare to try something different and make their food taste better.

During this disruptive move to challenge consumers to change their cola, we saw an all time high of people switching from Coke Zero to Pepsi Max. Not only that, but Pepsi Max also reached its highest consideration levels during the Meals campaign with brand dynamism growing +6PP vs YP.