Pepsi gets Becky G, Seal to raise Baja Blast awareness in Mountain Dew Super Bowl commercial
When it comes to Super Bowl advertising, PepsiCo wasn’t about to spend upward of $7 million to tout its eponymous cola or its popular sports drink that will already have real estate on both teams’ sidelines come Sunday.
Instead, the beverage giant will once again aim for awareness – and, it hopes, action – on behalf of a still-nascent brand.
For the second consecutive year, Mountain Dew Baja Blast will take center stage on Super Bowl Sunday, for a simple reason: Upside.
“Ninety percent of Americans still haven’t tried it,” says Greg Lyons, chief marketing officer for PepsiCo Beverages. “When we choose what brand we put on the Super Bowl, we make sure it’s a brand that needs help from an awareness standpoint and has something new to say to consumers.”
AD METER 2025: Sign up to vote on the big game's best commercials
PepsiCo does not run from Baja Blast’s origin story with most consumers – that it tastes almost genetically engineered to wash down a late-night meal at Taco Bell. In fact, it embraces it.
“When we advertise it, it’s going to help not only our retail business but also our friends at Taco Bell, because it’s exclusively poured on fountain there,” says Lyons.
“Baja Blast goes perfectly with Taco Bell food.”
The brand is deploying a handful of means-tested Super Sunday maneuvers to take it beyond the drive-thru lane and into the shopping cart.
Sunday’s ad will feature singer and actress Becky G., who has more than 37 million Instagram followers. It will utilize seals – the actual sea mammals as well as the pop superstar in a nod to ‘90s nostalgia.
And the spot will integrate the Mountain Dude – hailing from the Dew family of products – to extend the brand.
“Becky G. will resonate well with the Baja Blast target market,” says Lyons. “And we’re going to have a few surprises. There will be something in this ad that you will never be able to unsee that people will be talking about.
“Marketing these days has become so targeted. We do lots of personalization at scale and then you can get the exact right message to the exact right market. The Super Bowl has to be a broadly appealing ad. Humor always works. Lightheartedness, brands that don’t take themselves too seriously.”
Lyons estimates he has done more than 25 Super Bowl ads in his career, a process that sparks the creative juices but also inherently some nerves with it. If there is an arc to the Baja Blast market, it is roughly in the middle of what Lyons describes as three funnels: Awareness, consideration and conversion.
An audience that should total 200 million on Sunday should go a long way toward all three phases.
“There’s still a ton of pressure every year,” says Lyons. “But it’s good pressure. We love it; this is when we’re at our best.”
AD METER 2025: Vote on best commercials
The Paste BN app gets you to the heart of the news — fast. Download for award-winning coverage, crosswords, audio storytelling, the eNewspaper and more.