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Pepsi Turns Cardi B's Okurrr Into a Super Bowl Moment
Pepsi's Okurrr campaign is a 2019 United States television and digital advertising effort created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners that extended the brand's Super Bowl LIII "More Than OK" platform by centering Cardi B's signature catchphrase as the primary creative device in a standalone sequel commercial scheduled to air during the Grammy Awards.
The campaign launched in two distinct phases. The first arrived on January 28, 2019, when Pepsi unveiled online its Super Bowl commercial featuring Steve Carell, Cardi B, and Lil Jon — an ensemble set inside an Atlanta diner that framed the brand's "OK" positioning through celebrity comic contrast, as reported by revolt.tv. That 30-second execution, titled "More Than OK," aired during Super Bowl LIII on February 3, 2019, at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, according to adweek.com. The second phase sharpened the creative focus. A sequel 30-second spot, produced by Goodby Silverstein & Partners and released February 7, 2019, isolated Cardi B and built its central joke around a customer's comedic struggle to replicate the precise elongated inflection of her "Okurrrrr" catchphrase, per adruby.com. That follow-up was scheduled to air during the Grammy Awards on February 10, 2019, according to reel360.com, giving Pepsi a two-event media presence across one of the most commercially competitive weekends in American television.
The Okurrr execution sits within the broader PepsiCo Beverages Collection's ongoing effort to claim cultural relevance in the carbonated soft drinks category in the United States. By anchoring a post-Super Bowl extension to a Grammy Awards slot, Goodby Silverstein & Partners gave the campaign a natural second-news cycle without requiring an entirely new creative concept. The campaign contains one primary media asset and was archived to February 2019. Clapboard has assigned it a score of 70 out of 100, reflecting solid creative execution against a well-defined cultural moment.
Pepsi made a deliberate strategic choice in 2019 to compete on cultural territory rather than functional product messaging. The strategic context that shaped this decision was significant. According to scotts-international.com, 2019 marked the fifteenth consecutive year of carbonated soft drink volume decline in the United States, with value growth in the category sustained by pricing and product mix rather than by any increase in units sold. In that environment, brand salience and cultural presence became competitive levers of primary importance.
The Coca-Cola Company held approximately 18.6% of the United States soft drink market, according to Finance Yahoo, making it the dominant competitor that Pepsi consistently measures itself against. Rather than contest Coca-Cola on distribution or formulation grounds, Pepsi pursued a pop-culture differentiation strategy — one that Goodby Silverstein & Partners had been refining across the agency's relationship with the brand. A second competitive pressure came from the broader non-alcoholic drinks landscape, where beverage brands including Sprite and Dr Pepper were also investing in hip-hop and celebrity-driven creative to reach younger American consumers.
Cardi B's "Okurrrrr" provided a precise cultural entry point. The catchphrase carried genuine organic reach among younger demographics in the United States at the time of the campaign, functioning not as a licensed slogan but as an existing piece of vernacular that Pepsi could activate rather than manufacture. According to adsoftheworld.com, the campaign used the catchphrase as the creative mechanism, with the comedic premise built around a customer's inability to replicate the sound correctly — a joke structure that translated easily across social sharing. Derek Robson, Partner and President at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, has described the agency's philosophy as "mass intimacy is our secret sauce," as cited by adweek.com, a principle visibly at work in the decision to make an intimate, character-driven moment from a single cultural expression the spine of a national broadcast campaign.
Goodby Silverstein & Partners structured the Okurrr creative around a single, repeatable comedic mechanism. The joke — a customer attempting and failing to reproduce Cardi B's distinctive elongated "Okurrrrr" — is built for broadcast efficiency: it requires no prior knowledge of the Super Bowl spot to land, functions as a self-contained 30-second unit, and is inherently shareable because the punchline is phonetic and reproducible by the audience itself.
The Super Bowl parent spot, as reported by adweek.com, was set in an Atlanta diner — a location choice that carried geographic resonance given Super Bowl LIII's placement in Atlanta, anchoring the brand to the host city without making that connection explicit. Adweek noted Monét X Change as a contributor to the ad, though her precise role was not detailed in available documentation. The Grammy sequel refined the ensemble down to Cardi B as the singular creative focal point, a structural decision that gave the follow-up spot a cleaner comedic throughline than the three-celebrity dynamic of the Super Bowl original.
Jeff Goodby, Co-chairman and Partner at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, has spoken about the agency's creative culture in terms that illuminate this campaign's approach. As quoted in Ad Age on April 16, 2019, Goodby stated that the agency operates with joy as a working principle: "Joy makes you fearless to show people things." That philosophy is legible in the Okurrr execution, which commits fully to the absurdity of its central premise without hedging toward product messaging. Production credits for the Okurrr sequel spot are not publicly documented beyond Goodby Silverstein & Partners' creative leadership. The campaign's media investment was substantial: according to trendhunter.com, a 30-second Super Bowl LIII advertising slot cost approximately five million dollars, with Grammy Awards placements commanding a comparable premium, per reel360.com.
No verified performance data for the Okurrr campaign — including view counts, brand lift figures, or sales attribution — is publicly available at the time of this analysis. Assessment of its effectiveness therefore rests on structural and contextual indicators.
The campaign's architecture gave it two organic news cycles: the January 28 online unveiling generated earned media ahead of the Super Bowl, the February 3 broadcast created a mass simultaneous viewing moment, and the February 7 release of the Grammy sequel extended press attention into a third consecutive week. According to a year-end marketing review by Alipes, cited via adweek.com, Pepsi's 2019 Super Bowl work was classified as a success, with commentary noting positive sentiment around the campaign's entertainment value and cultural timing.
An Adweek review published February 8, 2019 described the Grammy spot positively, characterising it as entertainment-focused and generally well-received, according to adweek.com. The reddit.com community responses noted in available research reflect broadly positive audience reception, though social sentiment is an unreliable standalone proxy for commercial effectiveness.
Structurally, the campaign's strength lies in its sequencing logic. Using the Super Bowl to establish a three-celebrity platform and then isolating Cardi B for a Grammy follow-up is a disciplined media approach that reinforces recall without redundancy. The Okurrr catchphrase mechanism also gave the brand a phonetic asset that audiences could reproduce and share, creating low-friction organic amplification. Clapboard scores the Okurrr campaign 70 out of 100, recognising its cultural precision and media architecture while acknowledging the absence of independently verified outcome data that would support a higher effectiveness rating.
Pepsi's Okurrr campaign is a 2019 United States advertising effort by Goodby Silverstein & Partners. It extended the Super Bowl LIII "More Than OK" platform by building a standalone 30-second sequel around Cardi B's signature catchphrase, scheduled to air during the Grammy Awards on February 10, 2019, per reel360.com.
Goodby Silverstein & Partners created the Okurrr campaign for Pepsi in 2019. The agency, led by Co-chairman Jeff Goodby and Partner and President Derek Robson, produced both the Super Bowl LIII ensemble spot and the Grammy sequel that isolated Cardi B as the campaign's central creative figure, as documented by adweek.com and adruby.com.
The Pepsi Super Bowl LIII commercial featured Cardi B, Steve Carell, and Lil Jon in an Atlanta diner setting, according to revolt.tv. The Grammy sequel then narrowed the creative focus to Cardi B alone, building the joke around a customer's failed attempt to reproduce her Okurrrrr catchphrase correctly.
The Pepsi Okurrr campaign ran across several dates in early 2019 in the United States. The Super Bowl spot debuted online January 28 and broadcast February 3, according to adweek.com. The Okurrr sequel was released February 7 by Goodby Silverstein & Partners and aired during the Grammy Awards on February 10, per reel360.com.
Clapboard assigns the Pepsi Okurrr campaign a score of 70 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's cultural precision in leveraging Cardi B's catchphrase and its disciplined two-event media sequencing across Super Bowl LIII and the Grammy Awards, balanced against the absence of publicly verified outcome metrics.
The Okurrr campaign extended Pepsi's 2019 "OK" brand platform as part of the PepsiCo Beverages Collection's push for cultural relevance in the United States. Launched during the fifteenth consecutive year of US carbonated soft drink volume decline, according to scotts-international.com, the campaign prioritised celebrity-driven brand salience over functional product messaging.
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