Pepsi’s “The Choice” Super Bowl Ad Lit Up the Internet, Then Split It Down the Middle
Pepsi didn’t just drop a Super Bowl commercial this year — it dropped a pop-culture grenade with a smile. In the days leading up to Super Bowl LX, the brand rolled out “The Choice,” a glossy, joke-packed spot that revives the Pepsi Challenge and turns the long-running cola rivalry into a full-blown identity crisis. It’s a classic Big Game move: take something familiar, twist it, make it meme-ready, and let the internet do the rest. But what made this one travel faster than most wasn’t only the soda-war premise. It was the moment people realized Pepsi had woven in a wink to a very real, very viral Coldplay “kiss cam” scandal — and suddenly the conversation wasn’t just about taste. It was about tastefulness.
The ad’s hook is instantly recognizable even if you’ve never cared about soft drinks a day in your life. A polar bear — a character many viewers strongly associate with Coca-Cola’s wintertime branding — is dropped into a clean, clinical blind taste test. He’s blindfolded, he’s confident, and he’s ready to prove what he thinks he already knows. Two cups, two sips, and then the punchline lands: he chooses Pepsi Zero Sugar. Not hesitantly, either. He commits. And in that instant, Pepsi isn’t just telling a “we taste better” story. It’s telling a “your loyalty might be a label” story, which is a much bigger swing for a 30-second ad than most brands even attempt.
What happens next is where the commercial leans into comedy and self-awareness, almost like it knows the audience is already bracing for the internet’s reaction. The bear looks like he’s just been told his entire life is a lie. His face says betrayal. His posture says existential dread. The joke isn’t subtle: this isn’t a beverage preference anymore, it’s a full-blown crisis of identity. Pepsi plays it like a therapy-worthy revelation, which is exactly what the ad does — it sends him to a therapist. That setup matters because it tells you the tone right away. This isn’t a sentimental Super Bowl tearjerker. It’s a pop-culture gag with sharp elbows and a big, neon sign pointing at brand mythology.
Enter the therapist, played by director Taika Waititi in a cameo that’s deliberately absurd. The humor here isn’t about realism; it’s about watching a larger-than-life character treat soda allegiance like a deeply personal issue. The bear lies on the couch, wrestling with the idea that he’s a “Pepsi bear” now — and that simple twist becomes the engine for the rest of the spot. The camera lingers on his confusion like it’s a serious drama, and that contrast is what makes it funny. Pepsi is basically daring viewers to laugh at how irrational brand devotion can be, while also benefiting from that devotion existing in the first place.
From there, “The Choice” becomes a mini road movie crammed into seconds. The bear wanders through scenes of ordinary humans enjoying Pepsi Zero Sugar, like he’s walking through an alternate universe where everyone already made the choice he resisted. It’s a familiar advertising trick — show the hero discovering “the real world” — but Pepsi gives it a weirdly relatable emotional arc. He’s not just tempted; he’s searching. He’s lonely. He’s trying to find someone who understands. That’s where the ad’s second polar bear shows up, and the story shifts from rivalry to belonging. The message is basically: you’re not alone, even if you just switched sides in the soda wars.
Music does a lot of the heavy lifting in selling the liberation vibe. The soundtrack uses Queen’s “I Want to Break Free,” which is about as on-the-nose as it gets, and Pepsi clearly knows that’s the point. It’s not subtle; it’s theatrical. The bear’s “break free” moment turns a taste test into a personal revolution. For some viewers, that’s exactly why it works: it’s ridiculous in a way Super Bowl ads are allowed to be. It’s playful, it’s polished, and it understands that the Big Game is basically a national holiday for advertising stunts. But the same theatricality also primed people to scrutinize every reference — and that’s where the controversy talk begins.
Because tucked into the finale is the scene that turned a funny soda rivalry into a cultural argument. The ad ends in an arena-concert setting, where the bears appear on a giant screen in a kiss-cam-style moment. They’re framed, spotlighted, and pushed into a public display of affection — a clear parody of the viral Coldplay jumbotron incident that swallowed the internet in 2025. The resemblance isn’t accidental. It’s staged in a way that’s instantly legible to anyone who spent five minutes online during that news cycle. Pepsi doesn’t spell out names, doesn’t do a direct reenactment with humans, but the structure of the joke is obvious: a public “caught on the big screen” moment, repurposed as a punchline.
Challenge over, winner decided: The choice is PEPSI pic.twitter.com/RrcOKUTjoc
— Pepsi (@pepsi) January 29, 2026
That’s where reactions split. One camp laughed and called it exactly what Super Bowl ads are built for: sharp timing, cultural awareness, and a willingness to poke the moment while it’s still hot. They argued that Pepsi did what Pepsi has always done best — ride the edge, stir the pot, and make the rivalry entertaining rather than polite. They saw the kiss-cam nod as harmless satire, a wink that rewards viewers who “get it,” and a clever way to make the commercial feel current instead of generic. In that framing, the scandal reference wasn’t cruelty — it was simply pop culture becoming pop culture, the same way memes and late-night jokes digest news in real time.
The other camp didn’t love it at all, and their criticism wasn’t about the ad being unfunny. It was about the target feeling too real. The Coldplay incident wasn’t a fictional storyline; it involved actual people whose lives were impacted in a very public way. So for viewers sensitive to that context, Pepsi’s nod felt less like playful parody and more like a brand cashing in on humiliation as entertainment. Even if the ad doesn’t name anyone, the timing and structure make the reference feel pointed. That’s the ethical tightrope: when a moment is famous enough, it becomes “fair game” in comedy — but that doesn’t mean everyone agrees it should be used to sell soda during the biggest TV event of the year.
What intensified the debate was how quickly the conversation moved from “Did you see the polar bear?” to “Did you see what they referenced?” The ad didn’t need hours to get decoded — it got decoded instantly, then clipped, reposted, and discussed in real time. That’s modern Super Bowl culture: commercials don’t premiere only during the game anymore; they launch early, they get analyzed early, and the internet effectively hosts a pregame show where every frame becomes evidence. In that environment, a reference like the kiss-cam scene doesn’t stay a small joke. It becomes the headline, the debate topic, and the thing that defines the ad’s legacy before the game even starts.
Pepsi also benefits — and suffers — from the fact that “backlash” has become part of the marketing weather. A loud argument can look like free publicity, but it can also shift the narrative away from what the brand intended. Pepsi clearly wanted people talking about the Pepsi Challenge revival, about Pepsi Zero Sugar, about the audacity of using a polar bear that feels like it belongs to the competition. Instead, a big chunk of the attention got dragged toward the morality of pop-culture scavenging: are brands clever for using real scandals as winks, or is that an ugly habit of modern advertising? The ad became a Rorschach test for what people think satire should be allowed to do.
And yet, even critics had to admit the craftsmanship was strong. The pacing is tight, the visuals are clean, the bear performance is expressive, and the comedy lands in the way Super Bowl ads are designed to land — fast, broad, and shareable. It’s also strategically aggressive. Pepsi isn’t merely comparing itself to Coke; it’s challenging the mythology that keeps Coke culturally dominant. The polar bear is the symbol. The blind taste test is the mechanism. And the therapy storyline is the joke that makes the “switch” feel dramatic enough to remember. Pepsi turned a product claim into a story, which is what brands dream of doing on Super Bowl Sunday.
The ad also fits a wider pattern: big brands have been increasingly willing to reference internet moments directly, because memes now function like a shared language. The risk is that memes come from real events, and real events come with real consequences. When you reference them, you inherit that baggage. Pepsi appears to have decided the reward outweighed the risk — that the kiss-cam nod would feel like a clever cultural timestamp rather than a mean-spirited jab. Whether they were right depends on which corner of the internet you’re standing in, and what you believe advertising should do when it borrows from public life.
There’s also a deeper layer here that makes the whole thing oddly fitting for Pepsi’s brand personality. Pepsi has long positioned itself as the challenger, the disruptor, the one willing to make noise. A safe, sentimental, universally agreeable ad wouldn’t feel like Pepsi in the same way. “The Choice” is essentially a dare: it dares the viewer to admit that labels shape taste, dares Coke loyalists to laugh at themselves, and dares the internet to argue about whether the kiss-cam nod is brilliant or gross. That’s not accidental; it’s strategy. The Big Game is crowded, and the brands that get remembered are the ones that give people something to fight about.
By the time Super Bowl night arrives, the commercial will already have lived an entire lifecycle online. It’s been teased, released, clipped, debated, defended, criticized, and memed. That’s the new reality: the “event” isn’t just the ad airing during the game; the event is the rollout, the reaction, and the cultural echo chamber that decides what the ad “means.” Pepsi didn’t just buy a slot. It kicked off a conversation about rivalry, identity, internet culture, and where the line is between satire and bad taste. Love it or hate it, that’s the definition of a Super Bowl moment.
And maybe that’s what made it special: it didn’t try to be universally loved. It tried to be impossible to ignore. In a year when everyone is fighting for attention, Pepsi built an ad that weaponizes familiarity — the Pepsi Challenge, the polar bear, the kiss cam, the instant-recognition pop-culture language — and turns it into a spectacle people can’t stop replaying. Whether history remembers it as bold or too far, it has already done the one thing Super Bowl ads are built to do: take over the conversation.
