Advertising agency Communicator Interactive sought Go Media to develop an immersive Flash website to promote the Pepsi® & Pepsi Max® brands to the fans of the most popular sport in the world football, aka futbol, aka soccer. The campaign would be centered around soccer superstars David Beckham, Cesc Fabregas, Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, Frank Lampard and Lionel Messi, to include broadcast, web and print advertising as well as in-store point-of-sale and custom packaging.

Soccer’s international audience would have Go Media supplying our end-solution directly to a country’s Pepsi Co. conglomerate in their respective language, or collaborating with their creative houses of choice. Delivery of assets and support documentation to other creative agencies around the globe was a special requirement all its own. Designing for the diverse market in each country resulted in countless variations of assets at all levels to meet the cultural and branding nuances for each region’s consumer base.

An additional facet of the project was the campaign’s partnership with burgeoning social networking site Youniverse.com. Youniverse’s creative approach to bring people together by their “visual dna” has struck a chord with international audiences and was prime for a visually oriented sponsorship with a major brand such as Pepsi. Communicator saw a unique opportunity to pair its superstar spokesmen with the Youniverse VisualDNA™ generated user profiles for an entirely unique approach to engaging a fan base online.

Go Media would invest over 2000 hours, making this campaign one of our largest human resource investments on a single project. A completely custom solution was developed for every aspect of the project, with contributions from every person at the firm. At the project core was the Flash powered website where we created a multitude of interactive functionality to entertain visitors.

A main novelty of the Flash application was called The Football Widget, later named Desktop Takeover. This would require filming the superstar players on green-screen juggling a ball and maneuvering imaginary obstacles. The concept was to superimpose the footage into environments we would design & incorporate those imaginary objects into each action sequence. The players would be staged everywhere from the beach to outer space. This concept would compliment a beautifully shot, as well as composited motion graphic piece for broadcast from BBDO. A unique challenge was that the deadline forced us to create these imaginary landscapes concurrently with the commercial producers, so there was no telling how ours would compare to theirs.

Go Media would scour thousands of stock resources to source photo assets for 4 unique scenes: a beach, a soccer planet, a jungle, and an urban streetscape in Asia. The goal was to create animated scenes that would be published into a downloadable desktop application called the ‘Desktop Takeover’. Once downloaded, the app would connect to soccer related RSS feed and alert the user at customizable intervals.

Desktop Takeover would play one of many different animated sequences created for each player before showing an RSS feed based on their preferred web service. The Desktop Takeover also included a desktop background wallpaper of the users preferred star.

Another interactive aspect for the Flash site was the FLV player called “Kick It”. Fans upload a video of them being passed a ball, juggle it and then pass it out of frame, giving viewers an infinitely shared soccer ball as more and more users uploaded their versions. The superstar players would set the stage for what to do in this sequence. The composited green screen footage would be used with our scenes for the players ‘Kick It’ clips. The concept of sharing the ball was derived from the TV spot which had the soccer stars supernaturally kicking the ball to each other, traversing environments that were ‘out of this world’, literally! The guys donned outfits and costumes to suit their respective scenes, ranging from a spacesuit to a jungle explorer.

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