Situation: Due to price sensitivity in the CSD category, Pepsi had seen a 6.8% decline in consumption frequency, with a 37.5% increase for the consumption of cheaper brands.

Brief: Pepsi’s first summer campaign served to remind users that food tastes better with Pepsi, and that the right cold fizzy drink is just as important to the eating experience as any other condiment.

Objectives: To increase Pepsi consumption by communicating that food tastes better with Pepsi. Our target metric was a 20% increase in e-commerce sales, particularly via UberEats.

Our main idea revolved around convincing consumers that food just tastes better with Pepsi. Based on our insights, we partnered with UberEats, one of the region’s food delivery apps that is expanding into Dammam – its third city in Saudi Arabia after Riyadh and Jeddah. We leveraged the partnership to launch promo codes that customers could redeem against Pepsi drinks when ordering their food.

We also used UberEats data to segment our users based on cuisine preference across different regions. That segmentation helped us refine our targeting on other social media platforms, serving users TVCs and cut-down videos highlighting the association between Pepsi and food.

When our targeting data showed that our users were active streamers of music using Spotify and Anghami – up to 75 minutes a day, we made this new learning part of our strategy. We reached out on both platforms through curated playlists and video takeovers.

The campaign kicked off at the start of August 2019, with UberEats promo codes being redeemed. We began targeting key demographics identified through UberEats data on digital platforms and top regional TV channels (Dubai TV, MBC's, Rotana, OSN, SBC, Zee). Our first step was a 30s TVC running across all our platforms.

Two weeks in, we began serving 7-15 second cut-downs with finer targeting granularity across digital platforms. On YouTube, the cutdowns delivered 82% VTR and 80% VCR overall – a massive improvement over the standard 30s videos.

We learnt on the job, realising that our target demographics were very active music streamers. So, we curated playlists and audio ads on Anghami based on our users’ musical preferences, and also engineered a full audio and video takeover of Spotify. We also bolstered the campaign with a combination of feed and story video posts over FB, IG, Twitter and Snapchat.

Our campaign outperformed all targets and benchmarks set before launch. 87% of our audience was reached, higher than the 50-70% benchmark.

We saw 25 million plus digital views of our targeted videos, with a high 20.5% video completion rate on social. This translated into better brand performance for Pepsi, with +16% brand recall, +56% ad recall, +100% message association and +120% purchase intent on DMS. Purchase intent on YouTube for Pepsi drinks climbed 6.3%.

The positive brand metrics translated into sales results., with a 39% increase in UberEats sales in general, 48% increase in PepsiCo product orders on UberEats, and a 39% redemption rate on our Pepsi promo codes.

Most importantly, we managed to convince Saudi Arabia that when it comes to a cold fizzy drink accompanying a hot meal, there’s no substitute for Pepsi.