The Crystal Pepsi Trail
- Brand
- Pepsi
- Year
- 2016
- Objective
- Product Launch
- Industry
- Food & Drink
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- Web
- Agency
- Barbarian
Objective
Crystal Pepsi's return to shelves was staggered by market — Canada first, the U.S. a month later — leaving American fans with nothing to buy but plenty of reason to keep talking. Pepsi needed to hold that anticipation through the gap, turn the fan campaign that had brought the drink back into something shareable, and pull in a new audience beyond those who remembered it from the '90s.
Solution
You land on CrystalPepsi.net, a scrappy '90s fan-site knockoff complete with a marquee ticker, and get behind the wheel of a wood-paneled station wagon instead of a covered wagon. Steering across the country toward the mythical Crystal Pepsi Fountain, you scoop up era-appropriate loot along the way — a fanny pack, Skip-It, a pager, Rollerblades, floppy disks, a Mood Ring, a Scrunchie, JNCO jeans — while Mark Summers guides you and YouTuber The Amazing L.A. Beast pops up en route. Instead of dysentery, you hit 19 random mishaps played for laughs: your Tamagotchi dies, your pager flatlines, the fax jams, a CD skips, a tire blows, someone drags you into karaoke. Each haul and mishap racks up points toward a final score you can stack up against everyone else's, and the run's funnier moments spin off as shareable image templates for Pepsi's social channels, so the story keeps going on Twitter after the game ends.
Results
The campaign drove roughly 130,000 social mentions and 300 million impressions, with 75% positive-or-neutral sentiment. Visitors spent an average of 8 minutes on the site. The launch trailer posted a 104% organic engagement rate on Facebook in its first 24 hours, and its YouTube cut drew 9,300 organic views, above Pepsi's usual benchmarks.
- 1
The game opens on CrystalPepsi.net, a browser microsite styled like a mid-1990s homepage, complete with scrolling marquee text and webrings; the game launches from there.
- 2
At the start, the player is shown their vehicle for the trip: a wood-paneled station wagon standing in for the original's covered wagon, with the stated goal of reaching the "Crystal Pepsi Fountain," a source of the long-lost flavor.
- 3
The player sets out with a travel posse, guided along the trail by 1990s TV host Marc Summers, who narrates the journey.
- 4
The core loop is collecting '90s memorabilia along the route — among 15 possible items are fruit snacks, a bucket hat, a cassette player, a fanny pack, a fax machine, floppy disks, a crimper, inflatable furniture, a mood ring, a pager, rollerblades, scrunchies, a slap bracelet, a home-recorded VHS tape, and JNCO jeans — with points awarded for each find.
- 5
Between finds, random events interrupt the trip — 19 in total, reworking the original game's diseases into jokes, such as a tamagotchi dying of dysentery, a dead pager, a VHS tape or fax getting jammed, a scratched CD, a flat tire, a mall detour, or a rival wagon covered in Bedazzler rhinestones.
- 6
Some events are interactive detours rather than passive text, prompting the player to sing karaoke or bringing in cameos like video personality L.A. Beast and an encouraging Marc Summers.
- 7
Each finding and event is packaged as a shareable image, letting the player post their moment to social media and feed it into Pepsi's ongoing campaign conversation.
- 8
The run ends with a final score tallied from items collected and events survived, which players can compare against each other and replay to try to beat.
