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Pepsi Brings Love It Live It to China With Civilization
Pepsi's "Love it. Live it." campaign is a digital campaign created by Shanghai agency Civilization and published in China in April 2018, extending a globally rooted platform into one of the world's most competitive non-alcoholic drinks markets through narrative-led creative designed to connect the brand with participation and cultural passion.
The campaign sits within Pepsi's broader strategic lineage, as noted by Clapboard. It follows the "Live for Now" platform that Pepsi developed through several years of global activity, and "Love it. Live it." carried forward that platform's central thesis — that the brand belongs at the intersection of music, sport, and lived experience — while adapting it for the specific cultural context of China. The digital medium was the sole channel for this execution, reflecting the primacy of digital consumption in the Chinese market and the brand's intent to reach audiences where attention and identity formation increasingly occur.
In China, the campaign arrived at a moment when the non-alcoholic drinks category was growing in competitive intensity, with both global incumbents and domestic challengers vying for the loyalty of younger consumers. Pepsi's choice to work with Civilization, a Shanghai-based agency, signals a commitment to locally grounded creative thinking rather than adapted global production. The agency brought a roster of creative talent — including creative directors Elaine Young, Stephen Zou, Juno Zhang, Alex Xie, and Andrew Lok — whose collective work on this brief was oriented toward emotional narrative rather than product-led messaging. The single media asset at the heart of the campaign carries the full weight of that ambition. Clapboard has assigned the campaign a score of 56/100, reflecting a competent but not breakthrough execution within the Food and Drink category.
Pepsi occupies a clearly defined position in the global carbonated soft-drinks landscape. According to researchandmarkets.com, PepsiCo held approximately a quarter of the global carbonated soft-drinks market in 2018, operating in the shadow of The Coca-Cola Company, which commanded a significantly larger share of the same market. That competitive reality shapes every regional execution Pepsi undertakes, including the China market, where Coca-Cola's distribution infrastructure and brand familiarity represent a formidable structural advantage.
The strategic logic behind "Love it. Live it." in China is rooted in a well-established insight: that younger consumers in high-growth markets respond more readily to brands that reflect their aspirations and cultural identities than to brands that lead with product attributes. Pepsi had established this thinking globally through its "Live for Now" platform, as documented by flowjournal.org, which framed participation in sport, music, and cultural moments as the brand's primary territory. The China execution by Civilization translates that thinking into the digital environment, where Chinese consumers in 2018 were spending an accelerating share of their media time, engaging with content through platforms that reward emotional and narrative-driven creative.
In the non-alcoholic drinks segment, Pepsi faces competitive pressure not only from Coca-Cola but also from domestic Chinese brands that carry strong local equity and distribution reach. Against this backdrop, the decision to invest in narrative-led digital creative — rather than promotional or price-driven messaging — reflects a longer-term brand-building orientation. The campaign's emphasis on passion and lived experience positions Pepsi as a cultural participant rather than a transactional commodity in the Chinese market, a distinction that carries strategic value in a category where differentiation on taste or price alone is increasingly difficult to sustain.
Civilization brought a defined creative team to the "Love it. Live it." brief. According to adruby.com, the campaign's creative directors were Elaine Young, Stephen Zou, Juno Zhang, Alex Xie, and Andrew Lok, with Stephen Zou also serving as art director and Juno Zhang as copywriter. That combination of directorial and executional roles within the same individuals suggests a tightly integrated creative approach, where the conceptual and the craft-level decisions were held by the same hands throughout production.
The campaign's medium is digital, and its creative output is a single media asset — a discipline that demands clarity of intent. In a digital environment, particularly in China where content volume is high and consumer attention is contested, a single-asset campaign must function as a complete argument for the brand. The narrative approach chosen by Civilization reflects an understanding that emotional resonance, rather than informational density, is the mechanism through which digital content earns sustained attention. The "Love it. Live it." creative framework invites the viewer into an experience of passion and presence, consistent with the Pepsi platform's broader positioning around football, cultural moments, and youthful participation, as documented by adruby.com and thecreativesroom.com.
The copywriting by Juno Zhang and the art direction by Stephen Zou operate within a creative register that prioritises feeling over feature. This is a common strategic choice for non-alcoholic drinks brands operating in the Food and Drink category, where the product itself offers limited visual drama and the brand must be built through association and aspiration. No additional production credits, including director or production company details, are publicly documented for this campaign beyond the agency team listed by adruby.com. The result is a piece of work that reads as coherent and purposeful, even if its ambition stops short of category-defining.
No verified performance data for "Love it. Live it." is publicly available. No sales lift figures, brand-tracking movement, reach metrics, engagement rates, or conversion data have been published in connection with this campaign, and no awards recognition has been identified across Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, or WARC, as confirmed by Clapboard. No trade-press reviews from Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious have been identified for this execution.
In the absence of verifiable outcomes, structural effectiveness offers a useful analytical frame. The campaign's single-asset, digital-only format is well-suited to the Chinese media environment, where platform-native content with a clear emotional proposition tends to outperform repurposed broadcast creative. The narrative orientation of the work aligns with what the category and the platform context demand, and the involvement of a locally embedded agency in Civilization provides the cultural grounding that global adaptations frequently lack.
Clapboard scores "Love it. Live it." at 56/100, a result that reflects competent execution of a well-understood creative strategy without evidence of the kind of creative risk or formal distinctiveness that elevates work into the upper tier of category performance. The campaign functions as a solid expression of the Pepsi platform in the Chinese market, meeting the baseline requirements of the brief without surpassing them. For a brand operating in a category as competitive as non-alcoholic drinks in China, solid platform consistency has value — but the work, as archived, does not signal a step-change in either creative or commercial terms.
Pepsi's "Love it. Live it." is a digital campaign published in China in April 2018, created by Shanghai agency Civilization. It extends Pepsi's globally established "Live for Now" platform into the Chinese market through a single narrative-driven media asset focused on passion, participation, and cultural identity, as documented by Clapboard.
Civilization, a Shanghai-based agency, created the campaign. The creative team included directors Elaine Young, Stephen Zou, Juno Zhang, Alex Xie, and Andrew Lok, with Stephen Zou as art director and Juno Zhang as copywriter, according to adruby.com. The work was produced as a digital-only execution for the Chinese market.
Clapboard assigns the campaign a score of 56 out of 100. This reflects competent creative execution within the Food and Drink category without evidence of the formal distinctiveness or creative risk associated with higher-scoring work. No verified awards or trade-press recognition has been identified for this execution across major industry bodies.
"Love it. Live it." extends Pepsi's "Live for Now" platform, which positioned the brand around sport, music, and cultural participation. As documented by flowjournal.org and adruby.com, the platform was established globally before the 2018 China execution, with Civilization adapting its core emotional proposition for Chinese digital audiences and the local competitive landscape.
According to adruby.com, the creative directors on the campaign were Elaine Young, Stephen Zou, Juno Zhang, Alex Xie, and Andrew Lok. Stephen Zou also served as art director and Juno Zhang as copywriter, making both central to both the conceptual direction and the craft-level execution of the single-asset digital campaign.
No verified performance data or awards have been publicly identified for the campaign. Clapboard confirms no recognition across Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, Webby, or WARC, and no sales or brand-tracking metrics have been published. Structural analysis suggests the work met platform objectives without producing measurable category-defining impact.
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