Pepsi goes for brevity with five-second ads for emoji bottles

Pepsi knows being interrupted by ads is annoying.

That's why the company's latest ad campaign for its new emoji-clad soda bottles is brief: More than 100 ads that run just five seconds long will roll out all summer online and on TV.

The campaign marks Pepsi's latest bid to sweeten customers on soda at a time when fizzy drinks are losing air, pressured by the move toward healthier options such as water and tea. Pepsi is betting that emojis, and less disruptive advertising, are tactics that will lure consumers in.

"I knew emojis had hit a new level of mass when I got one from my great aunt," says Chad Stubbs, Pepsi's vice president of marketing. "It appeals to everyone."

Plus, Stubbs admits, 15 or 30 seconds worth of preroll ads ahead of online videos "kind of irritates even us. We already know consumers can take short-form entertainment. That’s where the entertainment journey is headed."

Pepsi's creative team came up with more than 200 original emojis that will be featured in the ads and on 20-ounce bottles of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max. The company will customize its strategy based on platform and context. For example, during the U.S. Open in August and September, viewers might see a five-second clip of emoji heads bobbing back and forth as they follow the arc of a tennis ball during a game; Pepsi has mined Google search terms, too, in order to better target customers — someone who searches for sunscreen might see an ad pop up where sunbathing emojis turn into lobsters.

Pepsi isn't the first to experiment with short ads. Geico had a series of ads on YouTube last year that highlighted the first five seconds before viewers are allowed to skip ahead. Padlock company Master Lock even ran a two-second Super Bowl ad in the 1970s showing the strength of its locks by shooting one with a gun.

Yet, this campaign is significant large-scale commitment to five-second spots, which television and cable networks aren't typically set up to accommodate. Turner Broadcasting will have to update its system manually when it starts running bundles of Pepsi's ads next month on TNT, TBS, Adult Swim and Tru TV. The broadcast company was willing to work with Pepsi because of the campaign's potential to create more powerful storytelling.

"This lends itself perfectly to the consumer experience and trying to make the messaging resonate better," says Donna Speciale, president of Turner ad sales. "The emoji is a symbol and it’s so global. You don’t need a lot of time for it to represent anything."

Emojis to grace Pepsi products in summer campaign

For an extremely fragmented viewing public, the short-and-sweet approach is a strategy that could become more prevalent.

"The challenge with advertising right now is it’s so easy for people to skip the ad," says Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. "With five seconds though, there’s not time to skip it."

Many videos on YouTube, for instance, allow viewers to skip an ad after the first five seconds.

The emoji-clad bottles are already hitting stores.  Pepsi has also invested in hundreds of thousands of product displays, nearly half a billion bottles and millions of fountain cups that will feature the emojis. It has also developed an emoji keyboard people can download to their phones and will encourage people to share their favorites with the hashtag #sayitwithpepsi.

While Stubbs says the campaign is flexible enough to appeal to a wide range of customers, the language of emojis has a clear advantage with younger shoppers, who are among the staunchest boycotters of carbonated beverages. About four in ten undergraduate students  consume bottled water at least seven times a week, according to a recent survey of undergraduate students by Beverage Marketing Corporation and college marketing agency Fluent.  A third of those students said they plan to drink less soda in the future.

"Pepsi clearly has a very young target, and that's an important consideration," Calkins says. "This is a bid for Pepsi to become part of the social media conversation."

Given the decline in soda consumption, the question remains whether developing an affinity for one of Pepsi's emojis will drive incremental sales. Pepsi's carbonated beverage sales fell 2% last year. The emoji campaign harkens back to Pepsi rival Coke's move to put people's names on Coke cans, and this summer, to put song lyrics on Coke cans. The concepts all attempt to drive a positive emotional connection with the brands.

But as Calkins says about Coke's name campaign: "In my mind, it was a cute idea that did good things for the brand, but it didn’t reverse the basic trends."

Follow Hadley Malcolm on Twitter @hadleypdxdc.