The Brief

The campaign touches upon an issue quite common yet ignored in Pakistan: lack of electricity in major parts of the country. When Pepsi found a solar solution to the problem and documented it, we conveyed the message to some top influencers in a PR event by showing them the documentary which was followed by a blackout they hadn’t expected. To remove the darkness all they had to do was tweet. Once they started tweeting, solar power lights turned on. This first of it’s kind, directly interactive event in the country left the audience in awe. All engagement carried the mechanics of 1 tweet 1 light where each tweet was responded with personalised pepsi bottles; providing instant gratification to each individual and enhancing brand recall. The people who tweeted also enjoyed ownership as each light was installed with their twitter handles tagged on it, enhancing the brand relationship with consumers immensely.

Creative Execution

We made our audience realise how something that they take for granted - electricity - is what a huge population of the country is deprived of. This created conversations relevant to the service and identified the problem. The key influencers invited at the PR event experienced the problem first hand, only to find out an easy way to solve it themselves. As they learnt how their tweets could change lives, they only tweeted more. The campaign was executed as originally planned, and in 2 months, helped us achieve the most important goal of removing darkness from people’s lives.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

The brand’s target audience is the youth. It has a positioning of living in the now. Making your moment instead of waiting for the moment. With this campaign the brand gave its audience the opportunity to take matters in their own hands and solve the problem themselves instead of waiting for the ‘system’ to resolve it, thus reinforcing the brand essence with the right audience. Pepsi already had a huge chunk of existing customers who influenced new ones as well.

Results

Local online advertising fraternities were talking about Pepsi within 2 days. Massively followed celebrities created a stir at our PR event causing our hashtag to trend in Pakistan organically within 4 hours. This made Pepsi the first brand in Pakistan to achieve that. The tweets kept increasing as Pepsi installed more lights. Online coverage of one of the installation processes trended our hashtag organically, the second time, making another record. The 2 month long campaign accumulated 38 Million hashtag impressions, 3.5 Million video views, 3% increased brand love and a phenomenal 27% volume growth [PepsiCo Data] helping us light up 4 entire villages.