The soda war never ends—especially ahead of the Super Bowl. And with its new ad, Pepsi officially reopens one of the longest-running and most symbolic rivalries in American pop culture, pulling off a move that’s as simple as it is diabolical: stealing Coca-Cola’s polar bear.
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The bear, for decades synonymous with Christmas, comfort, and Coke’s emotional storytelling, is thrown into a parallel universe where something feels off. The aesthetic is the hyper-polished one typical of Super Bowl commercials, but the twist comes immediately: the icon no longer feels at home. Pepsi plays with collective memory, borrowing a symbol that doesn’t belong to it and using it as a narrative lever to flip the rules of the game. In short, a very deliberate jab.
The commercial works because it doesn’t try to explain anything. It relies on the power of images and the strength of cultural references, assuming the viewer knows exactly what they’re looking at. The polar bear isn’t just a mascot—it’s a piece of shared cultural imagery, and that’s precisely where Pepsi lands the punch. The message is clear, almost brazen: if we can take our historic competitor’s most iconic symbol and make it work in our world, then anything is fair game.
In the end, it hardly matters which can we choose. What does matter is that the Super Bowl once again proves to be the perfect stage for rewriting the rules of global advertising. And if doing so means kidnapping a polar bear, Pepsi took that risk without much hesitation.
Read also: Do we like that Coca-Cola keeps going down the AI path?
