A legacy portfolio is redesigning how scale, creativity and technology work together
The defining challenge for an established consumer brand is rarely awareness.
For a portfolio as familiar as PepsiCo’s, the more demanding task is remaining recognizable without becoming predictable, and moving quickly without diluting the memory structures that give a brand its value.
PepsiCo’s latest marketing changes offer a useful view of how one global company is attempting that balance.
The appointment of Publicis Groupe as exclusive lead global media partner will bring strategy, planning, activation, connected identity, data and technology into a new “One PepsiCo” operating model spanning more than 200 markets. The move follows a series of changes in social content, creator commerce and artificial intelligence that together point toward a more responsive brand system.
The ambition is not simply to communicate more. It is to make relevance more continuous.
Scale is being reorganized around responsiveness
PepsiCo’s marketing resources are substantial. The company reported $5.4 billion in advertising and other marketing activities in 2025, including $3.4 billion in advertising expense. Industry publications estimate the media assignment moving to Publicis at roughly $1.7 billion, although PepsiCo has not disclosed a contract value.
At that scale, fragmentation is expensive.
Multiple markets, agencies, datasets and technology systems can each be individually sophisticated while producing an inconsistent whole. The One PepsiCo model appears designed to create a common foundation through which local teams can operate with better-connected information.
For brand leaders, the promise is compelling: a global identity and measurement infrastructure that does not require every market to reinvent the mechanics of modern media.
The risk is equally important. Centralization should not make a brand slower or culturally blunter. The strongest global brands are often recognized through consistent codes while remaining sensitive to local context.
That is where PepsiCo’s social-media changes become especially relevant.
Cultural speed does not require abandoning discipline
PepsiCo’s U.S. beverage business expanded its relationship with VaynerMedia into a “co-sourcing” model in 2025. The agency moved closer to internal teams, shared business KPIs and worked with less formal briefing processes.
According to PepsiCo Beverages U.S. CMO Mark Kirkham, content production tripled and some workflows fell from roughly a month to two or three days. He also reported engagement increases of 50 percent to 70 percent depending on the brand.
Those figures are company claims, not independently audited outcomes. Yet the design principle is valuable.
Cultural relevance is often perishable. A brand that recognizes a moment but requires several weeks to respond may arrive after the meaning has changed.
The answer is not indiscriminate speed. A premium or heritage brand that simply imitates every popular format can erase the very distinction it is trying to protect.
The more sophisticated objective is disciplined responsiveness: clear brand behavior, clear decision rights and enough trust within the organization to act while the opportunity still exists.
Creators are moving closer to the product experience
PepsiCo Foods’ Flavor Swap launch adds another layer.
The company introduced limited-edition flavor combinations associated with Madison Beer, iShowSpeed and Dude Perfect and sold them first through TikTok Shop before a wider retail release. PepsiCo described it as the first limited-edition PepsiCo Foods product to debut through TikTok Shop ahead of national retail.
The creators were important to the launch and its cultural framing, although PepsiCo says the flavor combinations were shaped through consumer and packaging testing. It would therefore be inaccurate to treat the creators as independent product developers.
The more interesting development is how much closer the cultural voice has moved to the product and purchase.
A creator is no longer necessarily an external media placement added at the end of a campaign. The creator can become part of the introduction, the context in which the product is understood and the environment in which the transaction begins.
For brand leaders, this places greater pressure on selection and fit. Reach alone becomes a weak criterion. The creator must make sense within the brand’s character, customer expectations and commercial objective.
The iconic still has a role
PepsiCo’s Super Bowl activity shows that modern relevance is not synonymous with abandoning traditional brand-building moments.
The company ran four commercials across Pepsi Zero Sugar, Lay’s and Poppi at Super Bowl LX. Pepsi’s spot, directed by Taika Waititi, used a blind taste test and a polar bear associated with Coca-Cola’s advertising history. Lay’s and Pepsi performed strongly in USA Today’s Ad Meter.
The appeal of such a moment is scale, but the role of scale is changing.
A major television event can serve as a cultural anchor that is extended through social content, search, retail, product trial and conversation. The brand does not have to choose between a memorable mass-media expression and responsive digital activity.
It can use each for what it does best.
That principle applies to smaller image-conscious brands as well. A beautifully produced campaign, launch event or editorial collaboration should not exist as an isolated object. It should create material that can travel across the customer journey while preserving the same visual and verbal signature.
Intelligent media should strengthen memory, not merely efficiency
PepsiCo’s artificial-intelligence investments suggest that optimization is moving closer to the heart of media strategy.
The company announced a multi-year relationship with Google Cloud in April that includes the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and extends across analytics, supply chain and go-to-market decisions.
PepsiCo’s European media organization says AI-powered Video reach campaigns represent more than 60 percent of its YouTube Ads activity and have helped lower YouTube CPM by roughly 25 percent year over year. In a U.K. Doritos test, Gemini-powered technology identified emotionally intense moments in videos and placed ads around them. PepsiCo reported an 11.6 percent increase in Brand Lift without a higher CPM.
These are PepsiCo-reported results presented on a Google platform, and they deserve that attribution.
They nevertheless raise a more important brand question. If machines become increasingly capable of choosing audiences, moments and variations, what remains distinctively human?
The answer may be taste, judgment and the definition of what the brand should mean.
AI can improve timing. It can help adapt creative. It can reduce media waste. It cannot decide, without human direction, which associations a brand should build over years or which cultural opportunities are beneath the brand even if they promise short-term attention.
Relevance also depends on value
PepsiCo’s North American performance is a useful reminder that brand sophistication exists within economic reality.
Second-quarter 2026 net revenue rose 6.4 percent overall to $24.18 billion, but PepsiCo Foods North America revenue declined 2 percent. PepsiCo Beverages North America grew 7 percent on a reported basis, with acquisitions contributing much of that growth and organic revenue increasing 1 percent.
Management has described greater pressure on U.S. consumers and weaker conversion in impulse channels as gasoline prices rose.
PepsiCo’s response includes more North American marketing investment and lower suggested retail prices on numerous snack products, with reductions of up to nearly 15 percent.
That is an important act of brand stewardship in its own right.
A brand promise is not only visual identity or storytelling. It includes the customer’s judgment of value. When economic pressure changes that judgment, communication and offer design need to evolve together.
A blueprint for smaller brands
Most businesses cannot reproduce PepsiCo’s technology, agency network or media investment. They can still borrow the underlying discipline.
Build a small set of recognizable brand codes and protect them. Define which parts of the brand can move quickly and which require review. Give teams enough authority to respond without turning every decision into executive theater. Connect social activity to the product and purchase experience. Use AI to improve insight and execution, but keep human judgment responsible for taste and meaning.
Most importantly, resist the assumption that relevance is the same as novelty.
The goal is not to look different every week.
The goal is to be unmistakably yourself in more of the moments that matter.
The new value of a legacy portfolio
Publicis now has the task of helping PepsiCo connect a vast media operation under one model. The financial results of that transformation will take time to judge. PepsiCo’s third-quarter report is scheduled for October 8, but no single quarter can establish whether a global marketing architecture has succeeded.
The more enduring question is whether PepsiCo can make its brands move at cultural speed without making them feel temporary.
That is the tension facing every mature brand in an algorithmic media environment.
Technology makes it easier to produce, target and optimize. The resulting abundance makes distinctive memory, coherent character and disciplined judgment more valuable.
PepsiCo’s emerging blueprint is an attempt to hold both sides at once: scale and agility, intelligence and creativity, heritage and immediacy.
For brand leaders, that may be the more important transformation to watch.
