Food Deserves Pepsi
Pepsi and GIPHY teamed up with top GIF artists to create fun, food-themed animated GIFs for Pepsi’s bold summer campaign.
Pepsi Serves Up Summer with a Side of GIFs
As part of Pepsi’s summer campaign, “Food Deserves Pepsi,” the brand set out to dominate both dinner tables and digital conversations. The campaign flipped the script on Coca-Cola’s classic “Share a Coke” campaign by replacing names with iconic food pairings to reinforce the idea that Pepsi is the perfect match for your favorite summertime foods. Beyond packaging and promos, Pepsi extended the campaign to social platforms where food culture thrives which included a major push on GIPHY.
To amplify the “Food Deserves Pepsi” message in a playful and easily shareable way, Pepsi and GIPHY partnered with various artists to create a collection of Pepsi animated GIFs that celebrate summer meals as perfect pairing with Pepsi. Each GIF was designed to highlight popular foods with bold, energetic color and humorous scenarios, all clearly branded, making them ideal to use in Instagram Stories, DMs, TikTok reactions, etc. Labeled with the official #FoodDeservesPepsi tag, the GIFs were optimized for search-ability and engagement across GIPHY’s vast GIF and animated sticker ecosystem.
Client
Pepsi
Agency
GIPHY Studio
Artist & Animator
Justin Gammon
Creating Cool Content for the Summer Season
Feast Your Eyes
For Pepsi’s summer campaign, we created a series of playful animated GIFs where iconic summertime foods came to life with Pepsi being the main character. Each GIF followed a unified color scheme and featured a rubberhose-style character design, showing fun, offbeat summertime food scenarios that captured the joy and flavor of hanging out with Pepsi.
Snackable Content for Searchable Moments
GIFs That Sizzle
In partnership with GIPHY, we developed a collection of Pepsi GIFs designed for everyday moments like “Friday,” “hungry,” “working out,” and even reaction GIFs to express emotions like “well done.” Each animation was built around food-centric fun and popular search terms, making the content highly discoverable. This approach allowed the GIFs to surface organically in online conversations and spread naturally across all social platforms.
GIPHY and Pepsi Show the Value of Artist-led Animation
GIFs with a Human Touch
While AI tools grow more common, Pepsi and GIPHY leaned into something more intentional: artist-made animations. Every frame in this series reflects a creative vision, built from editable assets and handcrafted choices. It’s a reminder that custom work from real artists still delivers a level of originality, clarity, and control that’s tough to match with today’s AI.