Why Pepsi's Super Bowl Ad Backlash Reveals a Dangerous Marketing Obsession

The recent Pepsi Super Bowl ad has sparked outrage on LinkedIn, but the backlash reveals a bigger problem. As marketers fixate on distinctive brand assets (DBAs), we risk stripping advertising of emotion, showmanship, and profit-driving power.

This year's Super Bowl spot from Pepsi uses imaginative repetition to extend 'The Pepsi Challenge' into 2026. However, it has chosen to hijack the Coca-Cola polar bear and send him to therapy after it discovers it, in fact, prefers Pepsi Max over Coca-Cola Zero. Marketers have collectively lost their minds over a brand featuring its main competitor in such a huge ad moment.

We've come a long way as an industry that was once obsessed with brand image and brand love to fully understanding how brands work through a series of memory networks, with purchase occasions bringing brands to mind via DBAs. Byron Sharp lays claim to such a swing of this pendulum, as he shared very eloquently (and unusually humbly) on his LinkedIn.

I'm here to tell you the pendulum has swung too far and advertising is being simplified to the point where it can't reasonably do its job. And because my mobile number is at the bottom of my email and my address is clearly visible on my Strava, I've brought new evidence to placate the inevitable distinctiveness mob.

The main pushback around Pepsi's new spot, which System1 has tested, is that using Coca-Cola's DBAs in the ad will weaken the creative by building fewer memories for Pepsi and more for Coke. Or, as the more eloquent LinkedIn posts put it, 'It's a Coke ad!'

This should cause marketers great concern and keep creatives up at night. Could the use of competitor DBAs not add more creative strength than take away? Say through attention, fame, emotion, memory formation? Of course, to answer that question, marketers would have to believe there's more to advertising than distinctive asset use. Which anyone holding this POV clearly doesn't.

We've become distinctiveness-obsessed, at the cost of any other view of creativity.

New Research Proving It

I've just released a new book after researching the US and European markets, representing $140bn in market share from the Effie Insights database. Connecting all the campaigns to System1's creative testing. B2B, B2C, challenger brands, category leaders, you name it... It's a modern handbook on advertising effectiveness. And, unsurprisingly, we didn't discover that distinctiveness was the only output of creativity that mattered. It's 100% part of it, but it plays a role alongside three other key indicators of advertising effectiveness.

We found that distinctiveness is very much the hygiene factor of effectiveness. You need the ad's effort to be attributed to you. Crucially, we measure consumer brand recognition in the new research, rather than 'I reckon the use of that bear means this ad isn't distinctive for Pepsi.' However, we found that emotion (and its role in building more favorable memory structures), showmanship (and how it creates attention, trust and fame) and consistency (and its role in supercharging strategy) all build on top of distinctiveness to deliver profit in their own ways.

My favorite insight comes from linking creative measurement to Effie's data. Distinctiveness is so very important; it means increasing your media spend leads to a higher likelihood of revenue. But revenue is table stakes (77% of campaigns report revenue increase), it's profit that matters. Distinctiveness alone struggles to increase the likelihood of profit without emotion. Distinctiveness turns media spend into revenue, but emotion turns revenue into profit.

Maybe this entertaining, culturally relevant, creative idea that uses Coca-Cola's assets increases the emotional appeal to the ad while still managing high distinctiveness? But, of course, we can't think like this with our singular blinkered view of distinctiveness on.

Now, you may think I'm being too harsh on some well-meaning marketing thinking, but I don't think marketers have become distinctiveness-obsessed because of a few mean tweets after I posted in favor of the Pepsi team's new ad. The data in this new colossal research sadly demonstrates how many marketers are being led down the DBA garden path, without a care for a broader view on creativity.

When you combine these four views of creativity with media spend, Excess Share of Creativity (ESOC) emerges. This is the creative advantage that actually manages to enter the market. It beautifully captures not only whether a marketer has managed to create a better ad, but also whether they've noticed this and fought to get more budget behind that better ad so it can do the work it deserves. ESOC significantly predicts share growth and exponentially predicts profit growth.

You can see whether marketers are any good at planning creative and media together like this through the Advertising Planning Matrix, which I stupidly shoved at the back of this new book. 38% of campaigns in this huge new research dataset are 'Busy Work' and only 17% are growth drivers. We are rather terrible at recognizing creativity and backing it with media to achieve ESOC.

But what's more revealing is what creatively holds the 21% of campaigns in 'Paid Noise' back from achieving their true potential. Only 30% of campaigns are below their category for distinctiveness, 73% are below the average emotional response and 69% fall behind on showmanship (the use of character, story, humor, etc). These campaigns with the largest media spend are nailing their DBA use, but the rest is missing. A lack of emotion and entertainment is holding them back. The creative lights are on, but no one's home.

So, from the data, the most impactful way we can dramatically increase the chance of share and profit growth is to get these huge campaigns that are falling behind creatively but smashing distinctiveness to focus on making ads that also make consumers feel something. Distinctiveness is the perfect foundation on which to build all of this.

Which leads us to the Pepsi Super Bowl ad... We've tested it using the same research in this huge new research (System1's Test Your Ad) and not only is it more distinctive than the category, but it has more showmanship and, most importantly, it's one of the most emotional Super Bowl ads we've tested. And the brilliant Pepsi team isn't just saving it for game day. They have realized they have creative gold and they are backing it to properly achieve an Excess Share of Creativity.

I think this is marketing excellence and a great example of the benefits of judging advertising beyond just distinctiveness. Distinctiveness is very, very important, but let's not lose sight of everything else that is.