Two-liter bottles of soda and bags of chips are synonymous with game day. But when it comes to the Super Bowl, it's all business for snack food's biggest player.
"Over 90 percent of consumers are going to have snacks and beverages during the game, and most of them are going to be Pepsi-Co products," said Greg Lyons, CMO of PepsiCo Beverages North America.
The company, which owns Frito-Lay, produces 600 million pounds of snacks in the six weeks leading up to the NFL championship game, said Rachel Fernando, CMO of Frito-Lay North America.
"This is 20 percent of our annual production and the second biggest eating day after Thanksgiving," she said.
Ratcheting up the pressure is PepsiCo's long-held position as a top advertiser during the annual event and the sponsor of the much-scrutinized half-time show for the last nine years.
"We've got six different brands that we're advertising, each with their own spot. Then we've got the Pepsi Halftime Show, and we've got Gatorade all game on the sidelines," Lyons said.
While snack favorites like Doritos will return with fresh ads, Cheetos also is coming back after a nine-year hiatus from advertising at the Super Bowl, and Mountain Dew will be getting press for an ad inspired by Stanley Kubrick's The Shining that will promote Pepsi's new Zero Sugar line.
PepsiCo also announced earlier this month that it will give a free Pepsi Zero Sugar to everyone in the U.S. if the final score of either team ends in a zero.
The biggest change this year is PepsiCo's halftime show partnership with Roc Nation, the entertainment and sports representation company founded by Jay-Z in 2008, which helped secure both J-Lo and Shakira for the big performances.
Skift airline reporter Meghna Maharishi breaks down how the government shutdown is hitting air traffic control—and what it means for travelers and flight safety
Aya Kantorovich, Co-CEO of August Digital, breaks down Bitcoin’s surge, crypto ETFs, institutional investment trends, and the future of safer crypto access.
Most members of the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate setting committee supported further reductions to its key interest rate this year, minutes from last month’s meeting showed.
Sinead O’Sullivan breaks down Taylor Swift’s genius marketing for The Life of a Showgirl, which just set the record for most albums sold in a single week.
Markets are emerging from a turbulent Q3. Horizon’s Mike Dickson shares insights on interest rates, small caps, and where investors should look in Q4 and beyond
Bambu Ventures's Kyle Pretsch dives into Lemonaid’s $10M buyout, down from 23andMe’s $400M price tag, and what’s next after Chrome Co.’s dramatic pivot.
Former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers learned all about technology’s volatile highs and lows as a veteran of the internet’s early boom days during the late 1990s and the ensuing meltdown that followed the mania. And now he is seeing potential signs of the cycle repeating with another transformative technology in artificial intelligence. Chambers is trying take some of the lessons he learned while riding a wave that turned Cisco into the world's most valuable company in 2000 before a crash hammered its stock price and apply them as an investor in AI startups. He recently discussed AI's promise and perils during an interview with The Associated Press.
