The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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By Webb Wright, NY Reporter

September 7, 2022 | 4 min read

Pepsi’s 18 Week Pack gives football fans the home away from home they never knew they needed.

Pepsi is taking brand immersion to a whole new level with the launch of the ‘18 Week Pack,’ a mobile home shaped like a case of Pepsi in which one sweepstakes-winning fan will be able to spend the entirety of the upcoming NFL season.

The 18 Week Pack is a tiny branded home that contains a Pepsi Gametime Fridge TV (a Pepsi-filled fridge inside of a TV), stadium seats, a “hottoman” (food-warming ottoman) and an upstairs loft that includes “an additional TV area to strategize and keep tabs on your fantasy team throughout the season.”

“We’ve made a tiny home that’s built for football-watching,” said Todd Kaplan, Pepsi’s chief marketer. “Literally, it’s a fully functioning home; it’s got hot running water, a washer, dryer, kitchen, bed, bathroom – everything you need. So all season long you can spend all 18 weeks locked away in football goodness and not miss a second of binge-watching RedZone and everything in between.”

Pepsi teamed up with retired NFL offensive lineman Andrew Whitworth to promote the campaign. In a new YouTube video that’s reminiscent of MTV’s Cribs, Whitworth tours the 18 Week Pack – his 6’7” frame perhaps making the environment look even smaller than it actually is. “Just you, your tiny home and your Pepsi,” Whitworth says at the end of the video.

Pepsi has partnered with Instacart for the new activation. The platform will host the sweepstakes and supply the winner with weekly $100 gift cards in order to keep the tiny home stocked and supplied.

The new campaign evolved out of the brand’s earlier efforts to create more immersive, engaging and exciting football-watching experiences during the early days of the pandemic, when many football fans were spending most of their time at home. For Thanksgiving 2021, for example, the brand launched the “Turkeytron,” a four-way monitor that sits on a pole in the center of a dining room table, allowing a family to simultaneously break bread together on Thanksgiving and enjoy the Big Game.

“With sports, everyone’s always innovating on the field ... No one’s really innovating the watching experience,” Kaplan continued. “The sport that we play at Pepsi is: how do you get the most enjoyment out of watching football on a Sunday? [That’s how we’ve come up with] a lot of these things that might be a little over the top, but we think will be a great way to connect with fans.”

In May, the soft drink giant renewed its longstanding partnership deal with the NFL (while letting go of its iconic sponsorship of the Halftime Show). The brand will continue with its #BetterWithPepsi campaign, which pairs the experience of drinking Pepsi with that of eating the kinds of foods that are commonly associated with sports-watching, such as pizza and burgers. Pepsi Zero Sugar has also become the brand’s leading product for its NFL partnership.

The 2022 NFL season kicks off tomorrow.

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