Recently, The Roost took on a marketing campaign using one of their podcasters to extend a Super Bowl TV ad into a larger campaign using social media, a polar bear costume, and two hand signs. To learn more, Bryan Barletta spoke with Catherine Browne, Vice President of Revenue and Partnerships for the Roost about the campaign.
How did this Pepsi ad campaign come together?
The Pepsi team came to us with an incredible Super Bowl ad called The Choice in which the Pepsi polar bear tries Coke Zero and Pepsi Zero Sugar and picks Pepsi Zero sugar. They were looking to extend this Super Bowl ad that’s only 30 seconds on-screen during the Super Bowl to well beyond that. And they were looking for podcasters or creators to create virality around this moment. So they thought Theo Von might be a great idea for this.
The polar bear doesn’t speak. So one of our first challenges was how do we incorporate this polar bear into a podcast which inherently requires a guest to speak on. So our team created the idea of this or that. Having Theo Von ask these crazy questions to the polar bear. And you can see in the clip they have the most fun engaging with each other in his set. It really created this amazing moment of taking a character on screen during the commercial and extending it into a multi-minute long segment that will reach a whole new audience beyond the Super Bowl.
A lot of creators worry that a brand this big will want to control every detail, but this looks like Pepsi genuinely trusted Theo to make it his own. How was the process of building trust with their team?
Pepsi shared their guardrails really early on in the process. So we had a clear understanding of where Theo could really take a point and run with it and be really funny and clever and creative. Because at the end of the day, what we wanted was again to build virality around this moment and this bear and entertain people, make them laugh. And so that is everything that Theo Von does right. It took a lot of communication, a lot of meetings with the Pepsi team, diving in with Theo to build something really incredible. I think we accomplished that with this campaign.
Over the two hour filming session with the Pepsi polar bear and Theo, we were able to condense all this incredible content into an amazing three minute segment that both met Pepsi’s brand expectations for the segment with also building trust with their team and creating this incredible end product that took their Super Bowl ad into something amazing off platform.
That trust clearly paid off, because the end result doesn’t feel like an ad, it feels like content people actually want to watch. Do you think that’s the biggest unlock here? That the brands willing to let creators be creators are the ones that end up with the most effective campaigns?
I definitely think that brands that allow creators to be creators is something that is so fundamental to creating something new and interesting in our space. At the end of the day, brands are excellent at finding their audiences and targeting their audiences. But where podcasters like Theo Von win are knowing their audiences and how to take a campaign, make it bespoke, really tailor it to their own audience and build something incredible like this polar bear on a podcast set. That’s not something I’ve ever seen before. And I think it’s just something that is so uniquely Theo Von and podcasts that really made something incredible.
Both creators and brands win when creators are professional and flexible and understand the needs and goals of a brand, but brands win when creators are given that flexibility and can be creative.
