On February 8, 2026, roughly 125 million people watched a polar bear have a crisis of faith on live television.

And Pepsi paid for it. All of it. Somewhere between eight and ten million dollars, depending on who you ask, so that Coca-Cola's most beloved brand mascot could be the star of the most talked-about cola ad of the year. A cola ad that Coca-Cola did not write, did not produce, did not approve, and did not pay a single cent for.

Let me say that again. Pepsi bought a Super Bowl spot and turned it into the best Coca-Cola ad of 2026.

Somebody got promoted for this. Probably several somebodies.

Here's the setup. Pepsi's spot, called "The Choice," was directed by Taika Waititi, who at this point will direct your nephew's bar mitzvah video if the budget is right. A CGI polar bear, unmistakably meant to evoke thirty years of Coca-Cola Christmas advertising, sits down at a table with two unmarked cups of cola. He sips from both. He picks Pepsi Zero Sugar.

And then, because this is advertising in 2026 and nothing can just be a commercial anymore, the bear spirals into a full existential meltdown. He's on a therapist's couch, played by Waititi himself. He's wandering rain-soaked city streets. Queen's "I Want to Break Free" is playing because subtlety is dead and advertising killed it. He eventually finds another polar bear who hands him a Pepsi, and the two end up on a kiss cam at a concert in what is apparently a reference to some Coldplay drama from last summer that, I promise you, no normal human being remembers or cares about.

The ad industry went absolutely feral for it. Ad Meter loved it. Adweek loved it. The marketing trade press wrote approximately nine thousand articles about how bold and brave and "challenger DNA" it was. Pepsi's marketing VP Gustavo Reyna called it a defining moment. PepsiCo's global CMO Jane Wakely called it a "big reset moment."

It was a moment, all right. Just not the kind they think.

Here is the fact that should keep every Pepsi marketing executive up at night, but won't, because they're all too busy doing victory lap podcasts:

Coca-Cola has not advertised during the Super Bowl since 2020.

They weren't in the game. They weren't in the pre-game. They weren't in the post-game. They were nowhere near the broadcast. The only piece of cola-related brand imagery that 125 million viewers encountered during the entire Super Bowl was... Coke's polar bear. Coke's red color cues. Coke's can on screen.

In a Pepsi ad. That Pepsi paid for.

Marketing professor Mark Ritson put it perfectly in The Drum. He called it a potential "$8 million act of charity." The sole piece of cola advertising that 120 million viewers saw all night featured Coke's most famous asset, bankrolled entirely by Pepsi. That's not a hot take. That's a diagnosis.

Jason Aten at Inc. was even more blunt: "The moment that polar bear appeared on screen, the ad stopped being about Pepsi. It became about Coke."

And he's right. Not because he's clever. Because that's how the human brain actually works.

Let's talk about how people actually process brand information, because somebody at BBDO clearly missed this lecture.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has spent decades studying how brands grow, and their central finding is so simple it's almost embarrassing: brands don't win by being differentiated (better, tastier, cooler). They win by being distinctive (easier to notice, easier to remember). This is not some fringe theory. This is Marketing 201. This is the foundational research behind how virtually every sophisticated brand on earth builds its strategy.

Distinctive brand assets are the mental shortcuts your brain uses to identify a brand without thinking. A color. A shape. A sound. A character. And Coca-Cola's polar bears are one of the most powerful distinctive brand assets in the history of capitalism. They have been in continuous rotation since 1993. They show up on packaging, on Christmas trucks, in theme parks, in decades of advertising across every medium ever invented. Research consistently puts them among the most recognized brand symbols on the planet.

Here's what that means in practice. You cannot see a white bear holding a dark cola and think of anything other than Coca-Cola. Your brain does it automatically. Before you process the narrative. Before you see the Pepsi logo. Before the taste test even starts. The bear appears and your System 1 brain, the fast, instinctive, pattern-matching part that handles 95% of your daily decisions, has already filed it: Coke.

That's not an opinion. That's thirty years of memory encoding working exactly as designed. One 45-second ad with a bunch of Pepsi pack shots at the end does not override it. Not even close. BBDO knows this. The Ehrenberg-Bass research is not a secret. They did it anyway.

Why? We'll get to that in Part 2. But I'll give you a hint: it rhymes with "Cannes Lions."

OK but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the ad was so brilliantly executed that it overcame decades of memory structures and drove a massive wave of Pepsi-specific consumer interest. Let's look at the data.

Tatari, an analytics firm that tracks real-time search behavior after every Super Bowl ad, published their full scorecard for Super Bowl LX. They measured the incremental search lift for every spot in the broadcast. They indexed everything against the median to allow direct comparison. This is actual behavioral data, not some focus group where people say they "loved the creativity."

Pepsi's result? They didn't crack the top 10.

Let me put that in perspective. Pepsi spent somewhere around $10 million on airtime and production for the boldest cola-wars provocation in a generation, and they got less search lift than a Minions movie trailer. Less than Salesforce. Less than Xfinity. Less than Budweiser's Clydesdales, which, say what you will about them, at least have the good sense to be Budweiser's own mascot.

The entire Non-Alcohol Drinks category generated a median lift index of just 1.30, which was below the broadcast average and behind Entertainment, AI, Technology, and yes, Beer. Beer! Bud Light's Post Malone ad, which nobody is writing breathless marketing think pieces about, outperformed the supposed cola-wars masterstroke in actual consumer engagement.

But here's the number that really matters, and it's not on any scorecard. Go look at what people actually called the ad online. Scroll through the tweets, the Reddit threads, the group chats. Over and over and over again, people referred to it as "the Coke polar bear ad."

If your competitor's name is how people describe your commercial, you do not have a success. You have an expensive problem.

Northwestern professor Tim Calkins, as quoted by CBS News, was diplomatic about it. He said the ad made people feel good about Pepsi but acknowledged that "some might debate if it helped Coke as well because the polar bears are so associated with Coke."

He was being polite. He was being professorial. The answer is yes. It helped Coke. Coke, which spent zero dollars, which had no presence in the broadcast, which did absolutely nothing, walked away from Super Bowl Sunday with its most iconic brand asset freshly reinforced in the minds of 125 million Americans. Courtesy of Pepsi's marketing budget.

EDO sent me this statement: “Scoring the Pepsi Super Bowl ad for engagement with Coca-Cola (or Coke) shows that the spot would have had an Engagement Index of 308 for Coke, which would have ranked it #11 in EDO's ad-ranker compared to Pepsi ranked at #45. Coca-Cola got 78% of searches in the minutes following the airing vs. 22% for Pepsi, with searches referencing both brands (i.e. "pepsi coca-cola super bowl ad") counted for each brand.”

There is a branding principle so basic, so fundamental, so obvious that it should be tattooed on the inside of every CMO's eyelids:

At Super Bowl CPMs, every second of your ad should strengthen YOUR distinctive assets. Not your rival's.

Every frame. Every beat. Every dollar. The whole point of buying the most expensive advertising real estate on earth is to burn your brand codes into the largest possible audience at the moment of peak attention. Your colors. Your logo. Your characters. Your sounds. Your rituals. Yours.

The most emotionally loaded, most visually memorable, most narratively central element of Pepsi's entire $10 million Super Bowl investment belonged to Coca-Cola.

Not Pepsi's globe. Not Pepsi's blue. Not some new Pepsi character that could anchor campaigns for the next decade. A bear that has belonged to Coke since 1993.

It's the equivalent of Nike buying a Super Bowl spot featuring someone in a full Adidas tracksuit and then hoping viewers notice the swoosh in the corner. You wouldn't call that bold. You wouldn't call that "challenger DNA." You'd call it malpractice.

And yet. The marketing press clapped. The agency submitted it for awards. The CMO did the podcast circuit. Everyone was happy.

Everyone except, presumably, whoever at PepsiCo actually looks at the brand-tracking data six months from now. But by then the CMO will have already updated their LinkedIn. That's how this works.

Let's tally it up.

Pepsi got: Conversation. Social buzz. Ad Meter rankings. A bunch of trade press coverage. A narrative about "challenger DNA" and "taste superiority" that plays great internally. The warm feeling of having done something "bold."

Coca-Cola got: Its most powerful brand asset reinforced in the minds of 125 million viewers, across every replay, every social share, every YouTube view, every marketing article with a screenshot of the bear. For zero dollars. While doing absolutely nothing.

And Coke got the last laugh anyway. As CNBC noted, Coca-Cola is still the best-selling soda in America. And Sprite, another Coke brand, actually leapfrogged Pepsi last year to become the third most popular soda in the country. The market doesn't care about your Super Bowl ad. The market cares about distribution, availability, and habit. And on all three counts, Coke is winning the war while Pepsi is winning... the conversation about the conversation.

PepsiCo's Jane Wakely said that "there was a lot of industry debate about whether we were advertising our competitor by using a memory structure that is associated with that brand."

Good. Because you were. End of Story.