Pepsi flavor consumers are full of a sense of possibility –68% believe life is a game they intend to win, and 63% like to “go big or go home” [Pepsi Flavors Quant Study]. To reignite excitement for Pepsi Wild Cherry, Pepsi knew they had to reach these consumers with a first-of-its-kind partnership as the cherry on top of its marketing strategy.

Pepsi needed to drive massive awareness for Pepsi Wild Cherry, an iconic Pepsi flavor that has been available for more than thirty years.

As a challenger brand with a disrupter mindset, it’s Pepsi brand’s mission to create something ambitious, innovative, and a little wild that drives cultural relevance. Knowing that it’s increasingly difficult to capture audience attention with traditional advertising, our challenge was to drive consideration for Pepsi Wild Cherry, while reimagining legacy media partnership models at the same time.

FOX Entertainment and Pepsi forged an ambitious collaboration to create innovative programming that excited and engaged viewers and reshaped traditional media models at the same time. The result: Cherries Wild, a wildly entertaining half-hour game show, hosted by Jason Biggs, with a splash of Pepsi Wild Cherry incorporated into the gameplay, set design, and TV’s largest slot machine.

But a riveting half-hour of television was only the start – Pepsi also needed to reach the dual screen viewers. We learned that 73% of U.S. adults use a digital device while watching TV [SOURCE: Nielsen], and 55% of them are playing games during this time [SOURCE: YouGov].

So along with the prime-time TV game show, Pepsi created a custom Cherries Wild interactive mobile gaming app that allowed viewers at home to play alongside show contestants in real-time, giving fans a chance to win big.

In order to truly reimagine the game show experience for today’s fans, we structured the partnership to pull on each partner’s strength: FOX, a media juggernaut with a first-in-class formula for promoting new shows, and Pepsi, with its extensive product sales apparatus and penchant for out of the box marketing executions. Together, we built an interconnected program extending from the 6-episode linear game show on your TV screen, to the Pepsi Wild Cherry product in-store, to the custom-built gaming app on your phone, all rooted in giving fans a chance to win in a seamless way.

During a global pandemic, with a very compressed timeline, Cherries Wild was greenlit in August and premiered in February to align with the national push for Pepsi Wild Cherry.

Cherries Wild aired for 6 weeks on Sunday nights immediately following NASCAR on FOX, and every episode featured a branded “Wild Moment”. Pepsi created a custom Cherries Wild interactive mobile gaming app that allowed viewers to play along at home. To support the app and drive further connection, FOX produced multiple pieces of commercial-time content that encouraged viewers to play for a chance to win cash & prizes, all in real time.

Pepsi supported the show with retail displays in over 30,000 stores across the country and with QR codes driving app downloads on over three million in-store packages. FOX & Pepsi also provided sustained social, digital, and linear promotion throughout the Cherries Wild season, and LIVE during each episode.

Generating over 5 billion possible media impressions, all elements of Cherries Wild worked together to create a collaboration bigger than the sum of its parts. Exposure to the Cherries Wild partnership resulted in double digit lifts across all key brand metrics measured, including Brand Purchase Consideration, Brand Opinion, and Brand Recommendation (SOURCE: Phoenix). This proved that Pepsi and FOX’s innovative and interactive approach resonated with consumers, and their opinion about Pepsi improved as a result.

The Cherries Wild app earned a spot in the top 3% of all mobile gaming apps based on downloads (SOURCE: 42Matters, App Analytics), out of millions of total apps available.

The in-show brand integration and the custom spots earned triple digit lifts in Brand Opinion compared to Beverage Benchmarks, and the Pepsi Wild Cherry ads that aired during Cherries Wild significantly outperformed the same ads airing elsewhere (SOURCE: Phoenix).