Are you game?

Pepsi uses gaming to make its ad campaign more engaging.

The game is on. Pepsi is currently running one of its costliest advertisement campaigns, The Game, riding on the Indian Premier League wave. The campaign builds on Pepsi’s youth-centred theme of Youngistaan, introduced two years ago, taking it to another level. This time it combines gaming with TV advertising. The latest campaign, rolled out two weeks ago, casts film stars Ranbir Kapoor, who is also Pepsi’s brand ambassador, and Sanjay Dutt. It is designed as an interactive game spread across three levels, with each level corresponding to one commercial. Of the three, two are already on air and the third is expected to go on air soon.

In the commercial for Level 1, Ranbir Kapoor is seen entering a maze looking for a Pepsi. Inside the maze are seated game master Sanjay Dutt and next to him his lady love, played by actress Jacqueline Fernandes. Continuing in the spirit of earlier Pepsi commercials where Ranbir is shown devising ingenious ways to grab a Pepsi, here he must fight the game master. Dutt, dressed in a bulky red suit, plays the role of villain as he tries to keep Ranbir away from Pepsi. He makes Ranbir fall into a tub of water and prompts the viewer to crack a riddle: “Pepsi peeyega to bolega yahi!”(What will Ranbir say on drinking Pepsi?) A. Wow, B. Now, or C. How. A number flashes on the screen which users can call/SMS with what they think is the right answer. They can also log on to the Youngistaan website (www.youngistaan. com) and play the game.

In the commercial for Level 2, which broke last Thursday, Ranbir solves the riddle and breaks out of the water tub, only to land in a tunnel whose exit door is locked. Chotu, a one-foot-tall gaming character sent by the game master, prompts Ranbir to find the key to the door. Within no time hundreds of Chotu look-alikes appear, all shouting: “Where is the key?” Stuck again, Ranbir has three options to choose from to get to the next level, A. Magnifying lens, B. Scissors, and C. Horse shoe magnet.

The commercial for Level 3 breaks this Thursday, followed by the concluding film the week after. The winner will get Rs 50 lakh. Besides, there are prizes (free mobile talk time and songs downloads) for thousands others who give the correct answers. All the ads in the campaign end with the new tagline “Youngistaan Ka Wow”, which was introduced in February this year in another Pepsi commercial where Ranbir manages to steal a bottle of Pepsi reserved for the leader of a country.

Engaging consumers
For several years now, Pepsi has been targeting the youth — between 16 and 25 years — as its core audience. The entire series of Youngistaan campaigns — the first one rolled out in early 2008 with the tagline “Yeh hai Youngistaan meri jaan” — has centred on appealing the youth of today who is smart, in control of himself and believes in achieving whatever he wants. “While the series has been able to bring alive the optimism in today’s youth, the challenge for us was to take the communication to a different level. Instead of a one-way communication, we wanted the new campaign to be something that could engage our target group. We wanted to effectively engage the youth with the brand,” says Sandeep Singh Arora, executive vice-president (marketing), PepsiCo India.

How to do that? Says Arora, while television is certainly the most effective medium when it comes to reaching the audience, the challenge was how to make it more participative. Reality TV was one of the ideas that was bounced during the brainstorming, but certainly not the most captivating. Gaming, which interests a big section of Pepsi’s target group, appeared more effective. The company along with its creative agency JWT India thus decided to create a single 360-degree gaming campaign that not only involved television on a big scale but also mobile phone and the internet, the two widely popular digital mediums for its target group. While Pepsi has been using these mediums for promotions, it has never done so in a unified way until now.

Pepsi identifies 9 per cent of the viewers that watch TV as its key target group (between ages 16 and 25); the other 90 per cent are the more general viewers in all age groups. With the new campaign it wants to sharp shoot its communication on the 9 per cent (target group) so that a significant number among them participate in the game and thus engage with the brand. At the same time, it doesn’t want the campaign to be unexciting for the rest 90 per cent. “The task for us was also to ensure there is huge entertainment for the balance 90 per cent, and in fact, also getting some of them to participate in the game,” says Singh.

Brief and action
The brief to JWT India was to create a 360-degree gaming campaign with an idea captivating enough to excite Pepsi’s key target group to engage with the brand, and at the same time thoroughly entertaining for the rest. Singh says, “The one thing we kept insisting was to do it at a scale and level that would actually wow the audience.”

JWT India Executive Creative Director Soumitra Karnik, who conceptualised the campaign with his team, says, “If the product is about refreshment, then its communication also needs to be equally refreshing. We have attempted to mix the niche format of video-gaming with the mainstream. While the digital media happens to be a part of our 360-degree approach to the campaign, we have now made the TV commercial interactive. This is something never been done before. The consumer is actually playing the game within the commercial.”

The TV commercials for the campaign which broke on March 27 will be beamed throughout the IPL cricket series. “IPL is the perfect platform to roll out the campaign because the game is designed to be sequential and interactive. Day after day, week after week, the whole country would be glued to this one sporting event which will help us to build quick reach,” says JWT’s Karnik. Besides IPL, the commercials will be aired on most other popular channels with a heavy presence on general entertainment channels. The campaign is supported with a number of online initiatives as well. For instance, on April 2, Pepsi invited Ranbir Kapoor for a chat with fans on Facebook. Approximately 21,000 fans logged on to participate.

As for the response to the ad, Pepsi says there were close to 1 million participations in a week for level 1 of the game. “The numbers speak, the game is already massively popular,” says Karnik. “It will certainly be one of the most seen campaigns this IPL season,” adds Singh.