Pepsi just did what every brand dreams of during Super Bowl season: they made people actually want to watch their commercial.
The ad opens with a polar bear taking a blind taste test. It picks Pepsi. Then it walks through a city street as Queen's "I Want to Break Free" plays, watching regular people enjoy Pepsi everywhere. The payoff: two polar bears embracing on a Jumbotron, sharing a Pepsi together.
Yes, it's a direct jab at Coca-Cola, which has built its entire brand identity around polar bears for decades. But Pepsi went further — the ad is also a clever callback to the Coldplay CEO scandal that went viral earlier this year, except this time the embrace isn't a scandal. It's a celebration.
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Super Bowl ads have become their own cultural event. Millions tune in as much for the commercials as for the game itself, and brands know it. They spend tens of millions of dollars for 30 seconds of airtime, betting that a clever idea will stick around long after the game ends.
Pepsi's approach worked. The ad debuted on social media and immediately split the internet in predictable ways. Fans praised the marketing team for being "smart brilliant people," others called out the Coldplay reference as perfectly timed, and a few skeptics noted the AI-generated bears and compared it to other corporate attempts at humor that landed awkwardly.
There's something genuinely smart about the execution here. Rather than trying to convince you Pepsi tastes better (the blind taste test joke handles that), the ad leans into cultural moments people are already thinking about. It's self-aware without being exhausting. It takes a shot at the competition without being mean-spirited.
The polar bear taste test itself is the oldest advertising trick in the book, but remixing it through a viral moment and a Queen song gives it new life. Whether you think it's brilliant or a bit much probably depends on how much you've already seen the Coldplay clip circulating on your feed.
As Super Bowl season heats up, other brands will be watching how this lands. The bar for "clever" just got a little higher.
