Food Deserves Pepsi
Pepsi and GIPHY brought in a group of artists to create a searchable collection of food-themed GIFs for the Food Deserves Pepsi 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 the perfect pairing with Pepsi. Each GIF was designed around popular foods with bold color and humorous scenarios. Rather than watermarking the work, the Pepsi can is the character — the branding is inseparable from the joke, which is what lets these function as everyday reactions in Stories, DMs, and TikTok replies.
CLIENT
Pepsi
CREATIVE PARTNER
GIPHY Studio
STUDIO
Weirdo Works
YEAR
2025
MY ROLE
Illustrator & Animator
Justin Gammon
DELIVERABLES
Animated GIFs = 7 of 29
Social Content
GIPHY Stickers
RESULTS
3.8M views across 7 GIFs
24.1M campaign total (as of Sept 2026)
Food, Pepsi & a Lot of Personality
Feast Your Eyes
I built the series around familiar summer foods and gave them enough personality to carry the joke themselves. Burgers, fries, ribs, chicken and other cookout staples became characters alongside Pepsi cans, with simple setups designed to read immediately as looping GIFs.
A shared color palette, rubber-hose-style limbs and exaggerated expressions helped the individual pieces feel like part of the same collection, even though each animation had its own scenario. The goal was to make the work recognizably Pepsi while still giving the illustrations enough character to feel worth sharing on their own.
Snackable Content for Searchable Moments
GIFs That Sizzle
GIPHY works as much like a search engine as it does a GIF library, so the animations couldn’t rely only on the campaign name. We built ideas around common searches and reaction moments like “Friday,” “hungry,” “working out” and “well done,” giving the work more ways to surface when people were already looking for something to share.
That meant each piece had two jobs: work as a small branded story and make sense outside the campaign when someone dropped it into a text, post or reaction. The food gave us the visual hook; the search terms gave the GIFs a reason to keep circulating.
Built to Feel Handmade
Personality in Every Loop
These GIFs were small by design, but they still needed the things I care about in larger projects: a clear idea, a recognizable visual point of view and enough personality to make someone want to pass them along.
I illustrated and animated the pieces from editable artwork rather than treating them as disposable social assets. That gave me control over the expressions, timing, poses and tiny visual jokes that make short looping animation work. The end result was a set of branded GIFs that felt specific to the campaign without losing the hand of the artist behind them.