How Insight Publicis made Pepsi LongThroat the buzz word
If there was any doubt about the quality and success of the Pepsi LongThroat campaign, that simply vanished when it won a silver medal at the WARC awards. The award is globally competed for by thousands of creative agencies across the globe, and therefore remains a veritable platform for agencies to measure their creative performances with their peers around the world.
The LongThroat campaign was launched in 2015 when Pepsi wanted to introduce a new 60cl offering. The Seven Up Bottling Company, the franchise owner of Pepsi in Nigeria, obviously wanted a spectacular campaign that would be groundbreaking and, more importantly, it wanted the campaign to reflect positively on sales.
“Like any other brief, client wanted to launch a new 60cl into the market, the whole point was to come up with a launch that would be groundbreaking. It was very key that the campaign should inspire people to want to see the bottle and to actually buy Pepsi. That was critical in the brief. It was not going to be one of those campaigns that looked pretty and clients won’t sell. So the objective was clear from day one, action had to be taken and the action had to show in sales,” explained Chima Okenimpke, Insight Publicis’ Executive Creative Director.
In order to achieve this tall order, the team at the frontline agency knew they had to think deep to come up with something truly spectacular and inspiring. But that wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, because shortly before then, Peruvian beverage giant Ajeast, makers of Big Cola had actually disrupted the cola market in Nigeria with an offering that obviously gave more content for less money.
Ajeast was coming into the Nigerian market on the back of several successful launches into major markets in Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. In many of those markets it had risen very fast on the pecking order by eaten deep into the market shares of other established cola brands, courtesy of a unique marketing approach that appeals to the mass market.
As such, Pepsi needed to come up with something truly special if they must stop the ravaging Ajeast and that was what they got in LongThroat which didn’t just fascinate the consumers but equally mesmerized them and encouraged them to literally LongThroat for Pepsi 60cl. The campaign was deeply rooted in digital marketing as it essentially targeted consumers between the ages 15 to 30, a demography defined by their love for social media.
Celebrities and social media influencers like Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, Davido and Sheyi Shay all got involved right from the pre-campaign period and drove home the #ThingsILongThroat to millions of their followers, thus setting the pace for a smooth and rapid take-off, which resulted in an instant digital success and ultimately sales.
“LongThroat is something that seems organic. It was an everyday conversation that Wizkid was just having with his fans on social media and nobody saw it coming but it was actually the beginning of a huge campaign,” Sinmisola Hughes, Copy Group Head, who played a key role in the conceptualization and execution of the campaign, disclosed.
According to her, “LongThroat is the first campaign in Nigeria that has broken the internet as a lot of people participated, not knowing it was actually part of a campaign. It was so organic. It was something that was naturally going viral. The fact that nobody knew that a brand was behind it was also groundbreaking. We hadn’t had that before.”
But getting the client’s buy-in on #LongThroat was not going to be that easy. In fact, the owners of Pepsi were initially skeptical about the idea because Long Throat didn’t seem to connote a positive experience. But after some persuasion from the creative team at Insight Publicis, Seven Up Bottling Company’s agency for 26 years, the brand decided to support the initiative.
Indeed, the campaign was groundbreaking in every sense. Apart from winning silver at WARC, which is quite phenomenonal, It also recorded many other milestones in the industry. Its video was viewed over 800, 000 times in the first 6 weeks of its launch, Pepsi twitter followership skyrocketed to over 40, 000 from a just 300, within the same period, overtaking Coca-cola in the process. It also had over 2, 200 contributors on Instagram, 45million timelines impressions, 15million unique reaches and 95 percent positive sentiment about the campaign on social media.
Above all, the campaign actually drove volume and lots of it for that matter as there was a 25 percent increase in sales compared to the pre-campaign moment. “One of the reasons why that campaign keeps winning a lot of awards is not because of the amount of share of voice which we got in the social space, it’s because it really drove volumes for the client and it really increased their presence, awareness, and penetration,” Wole Ogundare, Client Service Director at Insight Publicis told MARKETING EDGE.
Because of the success of LongThroat, the campaign seems to have set a new benchmark for the industry and also the Insight Publicis team, all members of which stressed that it was a new learning experience for them.
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