Pepsi Broke the Marketing Rulebook by Putting Coca Cola Front and Centre

The Advert That Gave a Polar Bear an Identity Crisis

Pepsi’s Super Bowl campaign, The Choice, takes a surprisingly simple idea and turns it into something brilliant.

A polar bear walks into a blind taste test.

On one side, Pepsi Zero Sugar. On the other, Coke Zero Sugar.

The bear takes a sip of each, makes its choice and discovers something completely unexpected.

It prefers Pepsi.

Cue the identity crisis.

Suddenly, everything the bear thought it knew has been turned upside down.

It ends up in therapy, questions its entire identity and eventually learns to embrace its newfound love for Pepsi.

There’s even a cheeky reference to the viral Coldplay concert kiss cam moment, with two polar bears caught on camera enjoying their Pepsi together.

Because apparently, discovering you prefer a different fizzy drink is enough to send a polar bear into an existential crisis.

Directed by Taika Waititi, who also appears as the therapist, the advert combines humour, nostalgia, pop culture and Queen’s I Want to Break Free.

According to UK creative publication Little Black Book, the campaign was developed by BBDO and PepsiCo’s Content Studio.

But the cleverest part isn’t the humour or the celebrity involvement.

It’s the decision to make Coca Cola’s famous advertising character the centre of a Pepsi campaign.

Watch Pepsi’s The Choice Super Bowl advert here.

Rule One: Never Give Your Biggest Competitor Free Advertising

Every marketer knows the importance of building distinctive brand assets.

Think of McDonald’s golden arches, Nike’s swoosh or Coca Cola’s polar bears.

These are things people recognise instantly, sometimes without even seeing a logo.

Coca Cola’s animated polar bears first appeared in the famous Northern Lights commercial in 1993, although the company had used polar bear imagery in print advertising as far back as 1922.

According to Coca Cola’s own history, the animated bears became one of its most enduring advertising symbols.

Pepsi took more than 30 years of brand recognition and turned it into the starting point of its own campaign.

Think about how unusual that is.

Most companies spend years and millions of pounds trying to make their advertising instantly recognisable.

Pepsi borrowed something its competitor had already made famous.

There was no lengthy explanation needed.

The moment viewers saw the polar bear, they understood the reference.

And when that bear chose Pepsi, the message landed immediately.

Pepsi didn’t need to tell people it was challenging Coca Cola. It made Coca Cola’s own advertising history part of the story.

Rule Two: Never Make Your Competitor the Star

This is where things get really interesting.

Because while the campaign might look like a creative masterstroke, not everyone was convinced.

Writing for UK marketing publication The Drum, marketing professor Mark Ritson questioned whether Pepsi had achieved something clever or simply spent millions reinforcing Coca Cola’s brand recognition.

And it’s a fair question.

What happens if someone remembers the polar bear but forgets which drink it chose?

What if the strongest association they take away is Coca Cola?

Could Pepsi have accidentally strengthened its biggest competitor?

That’s the risk of using someone else’s distinctive brand asset.

But marketing effectiveness expert Andrew Tindall offered a different perspective.

In his response published by The Drum, Tindall argued that marketers can become so focused on brand distinctiveness that they overlook other important ingredients of effective advertising, including emotion, entertainment and creativity.

And that’s what makes this campaign such an interesting case study.

Pepsi wasn’t relying on the polar bear alone.

It used a familiar character to tell an unexpected story, then filled that story with repeated Pepsi branding and a clear product message.

Rather than simply borrowing Coca Cola’s fame, Pepsi attempted to redirect what that fame meant.

The real question wasn’t whether people recognised the bear. It was whether they remembered who changed its mind.

And as we’ll see, the research suggests they did.

Rule Three: Don’t Question Decades of Consumer Loyalty

We all have products we buy out of habit.

The same coffee. The same trainers. The same drink.

Sometimes we genuinely prefer them. Other times, we’ve simply been choosing them for so long that we don’t question it.

Pepsi built its entire campaign around that behaviour.

The idea actually goes back to 1975, when the original Pepsi Challenge invited people to compare colas without seeing the labels.

More than 50 years later, Pepsi revived the concept.

According to PepsiCo’s official announcement, 66% of participants in its 2025 Pepsi Challenge activity preferred Pepsi Zero Sugar over Coke Zero Sugar.

Pepsi also reported winning the preference test in 100% of the markets where it conducted the challenge.

Of course, these are Pepsi’s own organised taste test results, rather than independent evidence of what every consumer would choose.

But they provided the campaign with a clear strategic insight.

What happens when someone discovers that the product they actually prefer isn’t the one they’ve always been loyal to?

That’s exactly what happens to the bear.

And suddenly, a fairly ordinary taste comparison becomes a story about identity, habits and challenging assumptions.

The timing was interesting too.

Pepsi reported that Zero Sugar had experienced 30.8% growth during 2025, bringing the product into more than one million new households.

That growth happened before the Super Bowl campaign, so it shouldn’t be presented as a result of the advert.

However, it helps explain why Pepsi chose to put such a big creative investment behind Zero Sugar.

It was already a growing product, and the campaign gave people another reason to consider it.

Pepsi wasn’t just selling a drink. It was challenging the reasons people choose one in the first place.

Rule Four: Play It Safe When Millions Are Watching

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest advertising stages in the world.

With 30 second advertising slots costing around $8 million in 2026, there’s enormous pressure to create something memorable.

Some advertisers turn to celebrity appearances. Others rely on emotional storytelling, nostalgia or comedy.

Pepsi managed to combine several of these approaches while taking a very public swipe at its biggest rival.

But the campaign didn’t end when the advert finished.

According to PepsiCo’s campaign coverage, the strategy also included social media activity, Pepsi Challenge tasting kits, competitions and appearances from the polar bear around San Francisco.

The idea was designed to travel beyond television.

First, get people talking.

Then give them an opportunity to experience the product themselves.

And finally, keep the conversation going long after the Super Bowl.

This is an important distinction.

A great advert can capture attention. A great campaign gives that attention somewhere to go.

Pepsi wasn’t simply hoping people would laugh at a polar bear in therapy.

It wanted people to reconsider their cola preferences and potentially try Pepsi Zero Sugar for themselves.

But Did It Actually Work? Let’s Talk Numbers

This is where the campaign gets particularly interesting.

It’s easy to call something successful because it goes viral.

But views, likes and comments don’t automatically make a campaign effective.

So what do the actual results tell us?

35 Billion Impressions and More Than 588,000 Brand Mentions

According to BBDO’s published campaign results and its 2026 Cannes Contenders case study featured by Little Black Book, Pepsi’s The Choice generated some impressive numbers.

The agency reported:

• 35 billion+ impressions generated by the campaign.

• 588,000+ brand mentions across its campaign reporting.

• 300+ social shares per minute during campaign activity.

• 29% sales growth, which BBDO says the campaign contributed to.

That’s a substantial amount of attention for a campaign built around another company’s famous character.

The sales figure is particularly interesting because it suggests the campaign was associated with more than just online conversation.

However, these figures are reported by the creative agency. Its publicly available case study does not provide enough methodological detail to establish exactly how much of the sales increase was caused by this advert alone.

Similarly, impressions represent exposure opportunities, not necessarily 35 billion individual people watching the campaign.

Nevertheless, these are significant reported results.

And there is independent research that supports the campaign’s strong advertising performance.

88% of Viewers Recognised It Was Pepsi

Remember the concern that people might see the polar bear and think of Coca Cola?

Well, that doesn’t appear to have been a major issue in independent creative testing.

UK advertising effectiveness company System1 reported that 88% of viewers correctly identified the advert as Pepsi’s.

The campaign also scored 4.2 Stars in System1’s testing, placing it seventh in its ranking of the most emotionally effective Super Bowl adverts of 2026.

For context, System1 reported that Super Bowl adverts averaged 2.7 Stars that year.

A 4.2 Star rating placed Pepsi firmly within its strong effectiveness category, which indicates potential for longer term brand growth.

That’s an encouraging result for an advert that deliberately featured a competitor’s familiar advertising symbol.

90% Brand Recognition in Separate Testing

The positive results didn’t stop there.

Advertising measurement company iSpot found that 90% of respondents correctly identified Pepsi without being prompted after watching the advert.

That was 18 percentage points above its benchmark for Super Bowl advertising.

The advert also achieved a likeability score of 728, which was 13% above iSpot’s norm.

The 88% and 90% results come from different research organisations using their own testing methods, but both suggest the same thing.

People understood whose advert they were watching.

And that’s a pretty important result when your creative idea involves a character associated with Coca Cola.

Third Place in the Super Bowl Ad Rankings

Pepsi also performed strongly with audiences.

The Choice finished third in the 2026 USA TODAY Ad Meter rankings, behind Budweiser and Lay’s.

It wasn’t just getting attention because of controversy.

People actually enjoyed watching it.

And on social media, Pepsi was hard to ignore.

According to Marketing Dive’s reporting on Sprout Social data, Pepsi was the most mentioned brand in its Super Bowl social analysis, recording 38,188 mentions, ahead of Apple Music and Budweiser.

That is a different measurement from BBDO’s wider campaign figure of 588,000+ mentions, so the two totals shouldn’t be directly compared.

But together, the findings show that Pepsi was attracting attention both during the event and across the wider campaign.

So Was It a Success?

Based on the available evidence, Pepsi achieved strong advertising recognition, audience response and social attention.

The agency also reported a positive commercial contribution.

That doesn’t mean every impression turned into a sale or that all future growth can be attributed to one advert.

But the results make a convincing case that the creative risk was more than just a publicity stunt.

Pepsi managed to borrow something strongly associated with Coca Cola while still making sure people remembered Pepsi.

That’s a difficult balance to achieve.

And it’s arguably the most impressive result of the entire campaign.

So, What Can We Learn From It?

The biggest lesson isn’t that everyone should start featuring their competitors in advertising.

It’s that sometimes the best marketing comes from questioning the rules we’ve been taught to follow.

Pepsi didn’t break conventions simply to create controversy.

There was a clear strategy behind its decision.

It understood the power of familiar advertising imagery, recognised an opportunity to challenge consumer habits and found a genuinely entertaining way to communicate its message.

And it wasn’t afraid to get people talking.

Of course, there’s an important distinction between challenging marketing conventions and ignoring advertising regulations.

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority provides clear guidance on comparative advertising, including the need for objective comparisons to be fair, accurate and verifiable.

Pepsi’s advert was created for the US market, so those UK rules are not a judgement on the campaign itself.

But beyond the regulations, the campaign raises some interesting questions.

Are we sometimes too afraid to reference competitors?

Do we spend so much time trying to protect our own brand assets that we overlook opportunities to create something unexpected?

And are we following certain marketing rules simply because that’s how things have always been done?

The answer isn’t to break every rule for the sake of it.

It’s to understand why those rules exist, recognise when they might be limiting creativity and challenge them when there’s a genuine strategic reason.

There’s also another lesson here.

Pepsi made a huge creative decision, but it still measured the results.

The campaign had a clear product message, a reason for consumers to reconsider their habits and a wider strategy to turn attention into action.

Because creativity and effectiveness shouldn’t be competing priorities.

The best campaigns find a way to make them work together.