Almost every corporate website operates on the same premise. They ask you to detour off the path of your everyday life and habits to dazzle you with their particular product or service. For Pepsi’s “refresh everything” launch, we took a slightly more selfless approach. Instead of asking you to come to us, we decided to bring the site to you.
We felt it was very important for the site be constantly changing, so we created a resizable grid of images linked to Flickr RSS feeds, as well as various YouTube videos. Both the pics and video are determined by a data API, so all content on the site is dynamically randomized and updated.
It’s also worth mentioning that we tapped into a secret, undocumented feature of YouTube, allowing us to pull HD feed directly from their servers… We could tell you how we did it, but then we’d have to strangle you with our Ethernet cable.
The other asset we leveraged was Pepsi’s huge presence during the Superbowl, so the site went live at halftime.
To help spread the word we teamed up with RSA to create a web series starring Will Arnett, who invited everyone to join him at his house for a Superbowl party.
The result was astounding. By the fourth quarter there were over 3 million unique visitors. Fans at the game were uploading pictures, or videos of their favorite endzone celebrations.
We were all so excited until our flash coder spiked his laptop. (Oh well. That’s the price of success.)