Weekly Buzz Viral campaigns & branded content

The Pitch Is Alive

For this year’s World Cup in South Africa Pepsi has launched an advert featuring some of the biggest football names in the world: Messi, Kaka, Henry, Lampard and Drogba. And that’s not all because the R&B artist Akon has collaborated with up and coming star Keri Hilson in writing and producing the soundtrack for the advert.

The advert features a beautiful match between individuality and a village using teamwork. This is very much like the World Cup events: The impressive individual performance and the team effort. In this case it is definitely the team effort that prevails through sticking together. The match moves over the savanna, through the high grass and down into suricat holes.

We have seen the big World Cup adverts featuring the big football stars before. We remember the world famous Nike “Good vs. Evil” from 1996, Nike “Ninja” from 2000 and the Pepsi “Cowboy” from 2002. All of these adverts have the commonality of having called for a huge budget and an intriguing location that matched the idea. This advert is a must see because of the funny little moment where Messi, with his 169 cm, gets lost in the high grass.