Pepsi Halftime Show: Creating a Companion Digital Experience

The Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show was the most-watched 12 minutes in entertainment, averaging over 100M concurrent viewers globally. For Super Bowl LVI, Pepsi — the title sponsor from 2012 to 2022 — challenged WillowTree to create a companion digital experience that would give consumers unprecedented access to the event, putting Pepsi front and center on a day where brands fiercely compete for consumer mindshare.

There's scale & there's SCALE.

500M

Pepsi bottles and cans printed with QR codes to promote the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show app

103.4M

Viewers who tuned into the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show

"For one of the most anticipated performances of all time, we needed a partner who could dream up new ideas, have best-in-class expertise, and deliver a fail-proof product. WillowTree was the only choice."

Todd Kaplan
Chief Marketing Officer, Pepsi

Turning 12 minutes of entertainment into six weeks of engagement.

Starting with a blank sheet of paper and driving toward an immovable deadline, WillowTree led a series of ideation and rapid prototyping workshops to identify opportunities to engage fans through a multi-week campaign in the run-up to the big game. Multidisciplinary teams brought rough sketches to life through high-fidelity mock-ups and breakthrough ideas like a fully-immersive, second screen experience rose to the top of the list.

From ideation to App Store in record time.

With the launch of the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show app in December — only shortly after ideation began — Pepsi engaged fans weekly with more than 30 in-app content drops ranging from artist merch giveaways to exclusive interactive photo filters built in partnership with Snap.

Cutting through the noise & winning the brand battle.

On game day, an in-app exclusive — the Pepsi Ultra Pass — granted fans access to a groundbreaking second screen viewing experience that brought fans on stage alongside legendary hip-hop performers. We engineered the app and back-end infrastructure to handle the load, and the experience was immersive, fun, and share-worthy — cementing Pepsi as the most talked about brand of Super Bowl LVI.

437K

Concurrent sessions per second at peak load with 99.96% uptime

Twitter Brand Bowl MVP

Pepsi drove the most conversation on Twitter during the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show

"From day one, the level of collaboration between Pepsi and WillowTree has been best-in-class. In such an important project with countless variables, the WillowTree team has been a close and agile partner who helped shape and elevate how consumers experience the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show."

Rich Funaoka
Director of Brand Marketing, Pepsi

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