Pepsi has built its brand on the back of some of the world’s biggest celebrities- both globally, as well as in India. Celebrities were cool, and no one used them better than Pepsi.

By 2015 however, young Indians no longer needed Pepsi to tell them what was cool. They decided who and what was ‘cool’ everyday- on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. True coolness was a function of Likes, Views, Retweets and Comments.

In a world where youth, rather than celebrities were the new definers of cool, we needed to get them to define it through Pepsi.

Crash the IPL heralded two fundamental changes in Pepsi’s approach to youth marketing:

First, we moved from using celebrities to creating (thousands of) them. Second, we moved from using the humble 30 second TVC as passive advertising to active content.

It was brave new world and things would never be the same again.

In order to truly restore Pepsi’s youth connect, we needed to go beyond merely airing commercials. We needed to get millions of consumers- not just the participants- interested, excited and involved.

We ensured that our story transcended screens by retargeting TV viewers on mobile. We drove traffic to www.crashthepepsiipl.com through direct mailers as well as by mobilizing key opinion leaders on social.

We ensured a constant and steady stream of buzz by creating weekly celebrities over 5 weeks, where each winning entry was given a full week’s run across both digital and TV- a never before seen, truly money-can’t-buy gratification for our consumers.

We ended Crash the IPL by inviting our viewers to select the last of the 5 winners- via a real time, Twitter face off. The winning entry was aired the next day and went on to become the most viewed Pepsi commercial in India since 2012.

Crash the IPL was created to get Young India to fall back in love with Pepsi; to get them to not just participate but to reevaluate their relationship with the brand. Did we succeed? You decide:

•Crash the IPL became the largest and most successful crowd sourced advertising campaign in Indian history, with over 4,000 30-sec TVCs generated over 5 weeks

•We reached 68 million consumers and enjoyed over Rs.90 million worth of free PR

•On digital, we engaged with 27.2 million consumers

•We trended on Twitter 8 times in 5 weeks

•Brand Love scores increased by 7%, Youth scores by 5% and Trend Setting scores by 4% over the course of the campaign

•Sales volumes increased over 100% from 10.6 million to 24.3 million cases over the course of the campaign

•Crash the IPL was recognized as one of the ‘Top 5 Greatest Campaigns Ever’ by YouTube India.