NEW YORK — Even as Advertising Week New York welcomes more discussion tracks centered on performance marketing and commerce media, splashy brand-building ideas can still command the spotlight. PepsiCo Foods on Thursday will present a case study at the annual confab on “Groundhog Lay’s,” a campaign for Lay’s chips that saw eight spots run dozens of times on a single network as part of a time-loop premise referencing the film “Groundhog Day.”
The high-concept effort, created with Disney, Maximum Effort, Kimmelot and OMD, is the result of an internal marketing approach at PepsiCo Foods that puts renewed focused on speed (“Groundhog Lay’s” came together in just a little over two weeks based on a casual text exchange). Other recent campaigns from the CPG giant, including Tostitos’ largest-ever around the NFL, share a lean approach, with fast production schedules that prevent marketers from growing overly precious.
“What we learned from ‘Groundhog Lay’s’ was that a simple mechanic is easy to execute in a lot of different ways,” said Chris Bellinger, who became PepsiCo Foods’ first chief creative officer last year.
At the same time, PepsiCo is trying to embrace bolder, weirder ideas. New ads backing Frito-Lay’s dips portfolio assemble a “Condiment Council” of ketchup, mayonnaise and other toppings as they hold an emergency meeting to address products like Tostitos salsa being applied on unconventional foods.
Marketing Dive caught up with Bellinger offsite, at PepsiCo’s Design & Innovation Center in New York, to discuss how his role is evolving, oversight of PepsiCo Foods’ internal D3 agency and plans for major events like the Super Bowl.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: We first connected to discuss “Groundhog Lay’s” in the first half and now we’re back here again. Presenting that work at Advertising Week, do you think of it as a calling card for what you’re trying to accomplish with PepsiCo Foods?
CHRIS BELLINGER: I loved the idea that we were not able to overthink it. In our industry, sometimes we work on stuff for six, 12 months, so by the time it gets out in the world, you’ve fallen out of love. It has inspired other activations that we’ve done and unlocked new ways of doing production and partnership. It’s forced people to be a lot more comfortable in the uncomfortable, which has helped us with ideation. We can analyze this to death, we can tweak it and [use] direction by committee as much as we want. But small strategic strike forces that can move really fast, they keep the premise of the idea alive.
It’s a year this month since you took on the CCO mantle. Why was that an important position for the company to establish now?
The nature of the world has changed in terms of content and creativity and how our consumers interact with us. Traditionally, you put out one ad a year maybe if you're lucky. Now, between social media and digital and advertising and content and culture, it’s constant and it’s constantly evolving. The fact that the company was willing to invest in a role like this says a lot about where it views the role of creativity within marketing and the role of creativity with our consumers and our brands. They are inextricably linked to one another. Content can be consumed at any moment in any place on Earth whereas before it was only in a certain place, in a certain time, if I happen to be there. Now, what we say is that the content and creative are borderless. We have to have a more focused and strategic approach.
A big part of that has been D3. When did that agency start and how does it relate to your function?
D3 was created by our now-CEO of beverages for North America, Ram Krishnan. It was originally a digital execution house focused on short-form videos on YouTube and stuff like that. When I joined, in 2018, D3 was a part of the media team and it had one full-time person. My role then was focused on the in-house team to elevate the creative IQ of the entire company, but also to build out this in-house function that can operate faster, cheaper but still as effectively. Over the last six years, we’ve built it into an around 140-person, full-service creative shop. It is now a core of the foods company that is designed to be there to help execute creativity at speed.
It’s different when a brand team gets to sit in the process instead of seeing it every two weeks. It’s encouraged them to be more creative themselves. Eventually, I got the opportunity to be the CCO, where I get to work with all of the external agencies and push that same mentality. Part of that is playing translator between the brand teams and the agency teams. It’s getting to better ideas faster and hopefully reducing some of that swirl. I want everyone to be jealous of each other. I want one team to look at another team and say, well, how are they able to do that?
Has the level of work exclusively handled by D3 versus external partners fluctuated at all? Is there more that’s being done fully in-house?
The rule of thumb is no one’s forced to use anybody. The internal team has got to earn their keep, just like an external agency would. I came from external and I hated the internal team because I thought they had an unfair advantage. When I joined, the cornerstones laid out were: One, the internal team will never pitch against an external team, and two, everyone has a choice. That’s kept everything at a fair, level playing field. Sure, there’s been more business won by the internal team from a standpoint of opportunities. I think it’s because the internal team just got better. But there’s been work that’s been lost by the internal team to external teams when it wasn’t up to snuff either.
Where have you focused on building out your capabilities recently? What are you starting to experiment more with as you think about how creativity is changing?
Everybody’s got to be a creator to a degree. That’s a rule on the team, too. I need you to be able to make something. That could be anything from social media to full end-to-end production, or it could be an idea. I do believe ideas can come from anywhere. From an internal standpoint, there is no one discipline that’s in charge. Everybody’s got an equal say and equal vote. With brand teams, it’s having them trust their agency partners. If they’re giving you a recommendation, you’re paying them for that recommendation for a reason. We call it debate, decide, deliver. No one wants to make something sh---y. It’s easy to fall under the trap of making something that’s the least common denominator. It’s hard, it still happens, but that’s what makes creativity so exciting and so challenging.
For the Tostitos NFL campaign [with Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman], when we last spoke about it, you were talking about what your expectations were. What has the initial response been and, like with “Groundhog Lay’s,” how are you learning from that?
I think advertisers and creatives, in general, fall in love with our own ideas. We’ve already made all the neural connections on the rationality as to why, and then you show a normie and they have no idea how you got there. With the Tostitos one, it was: “You can’t watch football without Tostitos.” It was that simple. It let us make six different ads in two days. That’s kind of unheard of now. For us, it was an intentional thing to test the level of range of absurdity that we could go in with, because that’s not what Tostitos has traditionally been.
For us, it’s figuring out what that simple human unlock is that an average person is going to enjoy. Sometimes that’s not the stuff that the industry loves. We joke around about it being blockbusters versus Oscars. Those are two different types of movies and two different types of audiences.
I also wanted to talk about Doritos bringing back “Crash the Super Bowl.” Was there a specific insight that brought you back to that idea?
When Doritos became an icon to a lot of people, it was when we put consumers at the very center of everything that we did. We felt like now is the time to do that again and let in a brand new generation of creators. The creator economy has completely changed. We have a whole generation that grew up creating content from the first time they got a phone. I can film a 4K or 8K spot on an iPhone now. I’m very excited to see what consumers come back with because some of the spots are things that we would never get through a first round of presentations.
Are there any other strategies you would want to dust off again, where there’s a lot of heritage but maybe it isn’t a muscle that’s been fine-tuned in a while?
I’m big on not reinventing the wheel. If there’s a great idea out there, there’s no reason why you should have the ego to not lean into it. Let’s see if it can work again, because there’s likely a whole new generation that never got the chance to engage with it. I know we often default to the shiny and new and original. I actually think creating a 2.0 is way harder than creating a 1.0.
I was just at an Advertising Week panel about challenger brands, a lot of which are DTC and tend to be favored by younger consumers. How much do they inform your strategy?
As a challenger brand, you only get so many swings. Some of our brands, I want them to embrace that because I think we get caught up in big budgets and big opportunities when we should be thinking a little bit more scrappy, a little bit more lean. That’s where creative breakthroughs happen. With so much content out there and so much noise, we owe it to our consumers to give them something entertaining, something they’re going to be willing to share. There is no bigger compliment than someone who texts someone else and says, “Have you seen this?” It’s worth its weight in gold. I can buy a like, I can’t buy a comment or a share. That’s the true measure of engagement for us.
