Dive Brief:

• Mountain Dew’s new “Do the Dew” global campaign covers 20 countries and rolled out simultaneously on social media and TV per a PepsiCo press release. The social portion of the campaign will tap Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook Live, Facebook Video and Instagram Stories.
• The overall effort was designed for mobile first, with the U.S. portion also heavily optimized for social media, including an initial ad appearing on pro skateboarder Sean Malto’s Facebook Page in vertical video format. It coincides with the introduction of new packaging for the brand. 
• Greg Lyons, senior vice president of marketing, Mountain Dew, North America, said optimizing the campaign for mobile comes from the knowledge that “the majority of our millennial consumers see messages first in the palm of their hand,” and that the brand is designing campaign creative to thrive in the mobile environment.

Dive Insight:

While it is not surprising to see a brand focus on social and mobile, what is noteworthy here is that such a broad-reaching campaign was designed mobile first, including the creative — which focuses on evoking the feeling of motion and doing — which leverages a vertical format for video. With increased fragmentation in the social media space, Moutain Dew is also smart to have a presence on several of the major platforms in order to reach as broad an audience as possible. 

Even though the global campaign is launching on social media and TV simultaneously, it’s telling that a youth-oriented soft drink brand would place an emphasis on social media and reaching its target demographic on mobile devices. There is likely some recognition of the prevalence of cord cutting among this demographic making it harder to reach them on linear TV, and also an acknowledgement that younger audiences are more likely to see and engage with the brand message through mobile-optimized social outreach.

Research has borne out this approach. A study from last September by native ad firm Sharethrough found that Gen Z, the youngest targeted ad demographic, prefers to watch both video and TV content on mobile devices with 71% of respondents using a smartphone to watch video daily, while only 52% say they watch video on TV daily and 45% use a desktop computer to watch video daily.