Pepsi Max’s Uncle Drew

In the marketing world, there have been many changes in how to market your products as back then, traditional media was the main/only source of outlet in order to attract an audience in order to sell your product. However, now with the digital age, we have new media, which uses digital technology to reach the masses. Though both of these are equally important in my opinion, I believe that New media is now becoming the more popular source of communication.

One of the most famous advertisements that really took off was a Pepsi commercial that was aired on Youtube in 2012. The famous Uncle Drew commercial presented by Pepsi. This stage reality ad presented Uncle Drew, who was played by famous NBA basketball player Kyrie Irving, who at the time was just recently endorsed by Pepsi and had decided to create an advertisement that would be able to successfully sell their Pepsi Max line. That was when they had an idea of dressing the NBA player as an 80 year old man and to roam around playing basketball with the younger generation. Though there was not much mention of Pepsi, you could see that there were subtleties dropped in the video, such as when the audience were drinking the product as well as the end logo. However, despite the amount of exposure of the product itself, many were extremely interested in the youtube advertisement, that the video itself has over 50 million views to date as well as many continuations of Uncle Drew including an upcoming movie.

Though this new media strategy that Pepsi had used was indeed a hit sensation, There are many different steps required in order to provide a very successful marketing campaign. From learning what your target audience want through research, choosing the appropriate social media channel to promote and update your promotional campaign whilst constantly updating your advertisement to match with the moving times in order to clearly show and integrate your message firmly into the target audiences mind. There are many companies that have been unsuccessful in creating such a campaign which impacts the consumers positively, however when done right, that is when you know that you have created a successful integrated marketing campaign (IMC) in order to beat your competitors and really show and project your organisation to the populace.

From this video this video, many have took up the same role as Uncle Drew and went out in makeup in order to keep the hype going, through this Pepsi Max was able to really create a viral advertisement and show off their products to the populace with a unique idea that was different from the competitors. The point that the ad gave off was that even though Pepsi Max was a zero calorie soda, no one will be able to notice the difference between regular Pepsi and the new zero calorie soda.

This ad was able to successfully deliver a message that even something lower in calories can still match up to the same as with how Uncle Drew was playing basketball with the younger players and the social channels used were so well received that it became a viral hit of 2012. What’s even more unbelievable, Pepsi had only invested around $250,000 into the Youtube Ad and was able to create such an unbelievable campaign. This only goes to show how much a creative and well-designed IMC could get you regardless of how much you spend to promote your campaign and furthermore, new media is slowly starting to overtake traditional media as more and more people have started to use their digital technologies more than buying the newspaper or reading magazines to find products.