PepsiCo recently appointed Publicis Groupe as its exclusive global media partner, ending a relationship with Omnicom’s OMD network that has spanned more than two decades in key markets including the United States and United Kingdom.
The appointment has shaken the marketing communications industry as players and observers watch campaign money potentially shift from Omnicom OMD to Publicis Groupe.
According to the announcement, PepsiCo didn’t follow the usual pitch process to select Publicis Groupe. On the contrary, PepsiCo went through the path of what it called a “media capabilities review, which does very little to explain how the selection process happened
Under the new arrangement, dubbed the “One PepsiCo” model, Publicis will unify media strategy, planning, activation, connected identity, and technology across more than 200 markets for brands including Pepsi, Lay’s, and Gatorade, with artificial intelligence and data positioned at the centre of the approach.
The exact amount spent on the contract is unknown, as one news source places the size of PepsiCo’s global media account at $1.9 billion, while another puts the account at approximately $1.7 billion. PepsiCo, however, reported total marketing expenditure of $5.4 billion in 2025, including $3.4 billion spent specifically on advertising.
Omnicom’s stock fell roughly five percent following news of the account shift, reflecting the scale of the loss for the holding company, which is also navigating an integration following its acquisition of rival Interpublic Group last year.
Omnicom will, however, retain creative, sports, and public relations duties for PepsiCo through agencies including BBDO, TBWA, and Goodby Silverstein.
Publicis had handled PepsiCo’s media accounts in select Asian and Eastern European markets including India, China, South Korea, and several Southeast Asian countries, prior to the global appointment.
“One PepsiCo” might sound sweet in boardroom presentation; it could generate tumultuous applause nd commendations, but when put on the ground, it runs contrary to the of humanity as it sees and interprets markets nd marketing.
PepsiCo is not the only global consumer family of brands to revise its marketing recently. Earlier in the year, Unilever, one of the biggest global households of consumer brands, announced a restructuring of its marketing to be on just social media.
CEO of Unilever, Fernando Fernandez, had then announced that the business would, in the future, create a content farm of about 300,000 influencers to carry the marketing messages of its multitudinous brands to the ends of the earth.
Unilever’s approach is different than the approach of PepsiCo. But the approach can only be compared from the angle of using a single thread to sew the entire world together. While Unilever was definitive with its choice of social media and its enablers, PepsiCo thinks a single global strategy is the way to go.
And just as the Unilever choice has not made sense to many observers, the adoption of a global campaign strategy by Pepsico is still generating reactions from the industry because of its historical unworkableness across many industries and corporations who have gone that way during the early days of globalization of marketing.
The renewal of the debate on globalization of marketing strategy by corporations was something that was thought to have been settled with the creation of the concept known as “glocalization” by those who went headfirst into the global marketing strategy idea but got burned.
But it doesn’t appear as if those who pushed the concept initially are willing to relent, even in the face of repeated failures of the concept. Why two of the world’s biggest brand houses are in a backwards motion to a system that hasn’t worked and is anchored on a monolithic, unipolar world to become successful is something that is hard to understand.
Back in 2019, the writer of this article had argued strongly against globalisation in marketing. In Chapter 10 of his book, “Pitch: Debunking Marketing’s Strongest Myths,” the author had written:
“For some inexplicable reasons, it appeared players in the marketing and marketing communications environment swallowed all the initial fallacies of a world in fusion.
As a matter of fact, it looked like marketing communication was the last to understand the cultural and socio-psychological dynamics that made it almost impossible for McLuhan to be absolutely right.
Creative people all over the world are known for their insistence and emphasis on identity. So why did marketing communications’ globalisation make sense to Nigerians and, by extension, Africans? Reasons for this are as discussed below.”
Globalising marketing strategy has not generated more sales. It has not made the world’s communities love brands more than they previously did. What it has been known to deliver is just cost savings. Businesses with a global marketing strategy spend a lot less. They operate much like software companies that use the same solution for all their projects all over the world. Once they have loaded their solution in a CD, they can activate the solution across computer systems in any jurisdiction, irrespective of barriers.
Marketing does not work like this. Human systems and computer systems are not the same. The issues of humanity, where the differences are nearly as many as there are individuals, make that impossible. There are also divergences along the lines of geography, tribe, race, and so on.
These factors shape the way messages are sent, interpreted, and shared.
Lesson from Competition
The trouble with centralized global marketing, I had written in my book, is resonance. PepsiCo should have looked for the templates discarded by Coca-Cola, its biggest competition in the world.
Coca-Cola was one of those who dived into globalised marketing, but it ran away desperately, haunted by serial costly attempts at tarring the entire world with the same brush. Coke’s “Share a Coke” campaign was a statement of its recognition of the supremacy of individuality.
By early 2019, Coke also released a new television commercial that suggested the brand may have learnt the lessons about marketing being local. Starring popular hip-hop sensation, Tuface Idibia, his wife, Annie Macaulay, and their children, the commercial, with a very local theme, “Mama de Mama” drew strongly on the importance Nigerians still attached to family and the role of mothers in preparing meals.
This commercial was an adaptation of the global “Share a Coke” campaign, and while it retained the overall global theme, it captured a local emotional feel about the importance of family meal times and the bonding it brings.
PepsiCo has not announced that its gobalisation will or will not have local feel adaptions, but it is important to caution in advance before they splash American hip hop culture all over the world in a futile effort to “Americanise” the different peoples of the world.
The cemetery of the world of marketing is filled with the graveyards of filed globalized marketing campaigns and while it is not the purpose of this intervention to exhume those who perished by taking that road, siting a few who got choked along that route has to be attempted.
The Fiat apology that made its entry into China difficult
“Fiat was forced to apologise to China after employing Richard Gere, the Hollywood star, Buddhist and campaigner for Tibetan independence, to feature in its television advert. In the 45-second Lancia Delta commercial, Gere drives one of the vehicles from the centre of Hollywood to the Potala Palace, the former Tibetan residence of the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in 1959. He meets a child dressed as a Tibetan monk and the pair plunge their hands in the Himalayan snow outside the palace. The camera then cuts to the slogan: “The power to be different.”
The ad enraged the Chinese, who complained that it advocates Tibetan independence. Some critics claimed that its slogan was a rallying cry for political change. Fiat, which was bidding to expand its operations into China, was forced to release a public statement distancing itself from ‘Mr Gere’s social and political views.”
The literature about these failed efforts is not hidden, and PepsiCo should have access to them at all its global decision-making centres.
Globalisation, right from when it began to gain ground, in politics, social and marketing ecosystems has remained a lie. Human beings were not created to think, behave, understand, and perceive the world the same way. We do not buy for the same reason; our consumption motivations are as different as there are cultures, peoples, and communities in the world.
PepsiCo is still whispering in the boardroom, but the world is waiting to see how the “One PepsiCo” concept will be iterated in a world where nationalism is on the rise among even peoples that were thought to have had the existing cultural nd other engagement lines blurred by time and interaction.
The budget is big enough to make things happen. Estimated to be in the north of $6 billion dims the 74 billion said to be the value of the Coca-Cola business, from which they must have to resign to be able to work on PepsoCo without the encumbrances of conflict of interest.
