Something You Don’t Want to Miss — Pepsi’s Super Bowl Halftime Show
Pepsi on Sunday night offered an immersive mobile experience to sports and music fans by live-streaming its star-studded Super Bowl halftime show in an app. This soda brand loaded its specialized mobile app and engage viewers of America’s most-watched TV event with a second-screen experience which provides more control over how users viewed the show.
This mid-game concert was a landmark for hip-hop music, starring Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar. This genre also approaches its 50th birthday next year. It was the first time that these performers have been brought to the same stage. Pepsi did it! Pepsi marked the event with a mobile experience geared for today’s viewing habits that often extend off the big screen to smartphones, which is definitely a good idea.
Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show app
As a person who didn’t pay a lot of attention to the Super Bowl, I noticed this action of Pepsi since their smart marketing of mobile apps and nowadays watching habits. By recognizing that an increasing portion of the Super Bowl audience started using their phone while watching the game, the beverage behemoth, Pepsi, introduced the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show app as a free download in the Apple App Store and Google Play last month.
It is such an agile action to both Super Bowl and customers’ habits. Pepsi grasps not only their customers but also the audience of Super Bowl and Hip-hop music lovers in a really good way. To entice people to continue returning to the app while building excitement for the show, Pepsi offered merchandise giveaways and surprise product drops. The app’s content included behind-the-scenes footage about preparations for the halftime show and the making of Pepsi’s video short that spotlighted each performer.
“In the weeks leading up to the Pepsi Halftime, we dropped a trailer, ‘The Call,’ that went viral within a week, with over 12 million views and fan reaction videos taking the internet by storm,” Todd Kaplan, vice president of marketing at Pepsi.
360-degree camera views
The most immersive part of the app was its Ultra Pass, which provided the app users access to the live-streaming views of the Halftime Show which weren’t available to those TV viewers of the 120minute telecast. By working with the National Football League, entertainment company Roc Nation and Verizon, Pepsi install several 360-degree cameras throughout SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. They make the user experience of the app more interactive, immersive, and active since users can select different views of the show as if they were standing directly on the field or on stage amid the performers.
This year & Last year
We are always looking for ways to level up and deepen the fan experience. It brought fans closer to their favorite artists during one of the most anticipated Pepsi Halftime shows of all time.
It is the second straight year that Pepsi focused its promotional efforts on the halftime show. Last year, Pepsi doubled down on the 12 minutes they already own in-game and evolve it from one night to a multi-week marketing machine featuring national TV ads, retail promotions, and digital platforms offering fans unprecedented access to artist and show content.
This year, Pepsi revisited this highly successful approach for the most anticipated Pepsi Halftime show to date. This year’s performance has racked up more than 47 million views on video platforms, YouTube, a number that’s likely to grow in the years ahead.
An epic show, definitely!
