With a large swath of the intended audience spending time with media in a self-directed manner, we needed to activate our strategy in a way that was native to their lives and daily communication.

It’s no secret young adults have an active relationship with Snapchat. With over 5.5 million active Snapchatters in Canada, addressability at scale is absolutely possible within the cohort to whom we were reaching. In fact, the millennial audience on Snapchat indexes at 133% against the total Canadian population.

With Snapchat lenses being used by over 3 million Canadians a day, there was a clear opportunity to create a Canada led, hard-to-miss way to interact with the Pepsi brand. That opportunity was making Pepsi bottles themselves into an interactive mnemonic for Snapchat users to engage with, utilizing lenses and the highly interactive front-facing camera - an idea that was crafted and brought to life in Canada.

Our key execution was turning our product into the primary medium: giving away 20 exclusive Snapchat Lenses, right on the packaging. Snap It with Pepsi is the biggest partnership Snapchat has executed in Canada (in fact it is the biggest partnership they’ve executed Globally) to date, and allowing consumers to communicate with our Lenses added a high level of value for minimal effort. Inherently Pepsi.

Many brands before us have created Snapchat Lenses, but we are the first in Canada to produce over 20 at one time. We also had to convince other social platforms to allow our campaign to run.

Through multiple elements including TV, OOH, OLV, social and more, we demonstrated the fun that could be unlocked on packaging by simulating the lens experience with illustrations of the lenses placed on top of real life action for an augmented reality experience.

Our ideas came to life in unimaginable ways, 20 exclusive lenses were created and applied across 20MM bottles. The program exceeded our expectations, generating a stunning 188% above target on lens plays unlocked through packaging. Additionally, we experienced an equally impressive results trend with lens views, achieving 191% versus forecasts.

From a business perspective, Pepsi experienced positive sales growth for a 3rd consecutive summer and most importantly out-performed its competitor by +0.7 $ share in a category where a tenth of a share point is highly coveted

Lastly, program recall proved to be 6% stronger than Coke, despite spending five times less in media, proving that millennials chose Pepsi as their preferred summer cola given the application of a millennial relevant platform.