Pepsi Unleashes Monster of a Promotion

If you were in Times Square in January or at the Super Bowl in February, you very well may have seen a 60-foot monster. The Pepsi Stuff Gift Monster to be exact. The 60-foot inflatable monster helped kick off Pepsi's year-long PepsiStuff.com attack campaign.

This year, the number-two cola giant decided to take its loyalty program out of cold storage and march it out with renewed force. Consumers purchasing specially marked Pepsi products can bank their points at PepsiStuff.com and redeem them for prizes ranging from logoed apparel to electronics to Amazon MP3 downloads.

"The Pepsi Stuff Gift Monster really ties into the overall theme of our promotion," says Bill Wyman, senior marketing manager of brand activation for Pepsi-Cola North America. "As we were thinking about how to show people the scale and size of the program, we kept coming back to ‘this program is really a monster.'"

The Gift Monster announced this new PepsiStuff.com promotion in a big way at the Super Bowl. Accompanying him were Pepsi Stuff crew members who distributed thousands of points to passersby.

Following the Super Bowl, Pepsi ran a television commercial featuring a computer-animated version of the monster made of branded hats, shirts and other items. After making his way through a forest, he stands before a group of teens drinking Pepsi and gracefully places a Pepsi-logoed trucker hat on one guy. "Goodbye Mr. made-up-of-different-stuff-guy," says a young man as he departs. A voiceover says: "Every sip gets you close to clothing, vacations, MP3 downloads from Amazon and more."

Participants at PepsiStuff.com can also enter a daily sweepstakes to win a variety of prizes, including a trip to next year's Super Bowl, Major League Baseball games and the Daytona 500.