Mariyka Gets a Modern Makeover Without Losing Its Roots
Mariyka is a PepsiCo curd dessert brand that Brain Tank repositioned in 2024 through a lifestyle-led campaign spanning television, billboards, social media, and point-of-sale materials across Ukraine and multinational Europe, using four distinct consumer scenarios to bridge traditional and modern eating behaviours.
The challenge facing PepsiCo and its Kyiv-based creative agency Brain Tank was precise: revitalize the communication around Mariyka without severing its emotional bond with loyal, traditional consumers while simultaneously attracting a younger, more contemporary audience. Published on August 19, 2024, the campaign — internally titled "Сиркові десерти Марійка: Смакуй Куштуй Експериментуй!" — set out to reframe Mariyka not as a nostalgic staple but as a brand alive with creative possibility.
The strategic cornerstone of the revamp was an insight generated through internal testing: consumers do not consume Mariyka in a single, uniform way. Some eat it with different spoon sizes, others pair it with biscuits, and others consume it directly from the lid. This variety of eating styles, rather than being treated as incidental, became the entire creative territory. Brain Tank built a communication strategy around the individuality of enjoyment, positioning personal taste as a form of self-expression. The Ukrainian market, where curd desserts occupy a well-established place in everyday food culture, provided the foundation for a campaign that felt both locally resonant and scalable across broader European markets.
In execution, the campaign deployed a key visual used across billboards and social media, a 15-second television commercial presenting four diverse lifestyle scenarios, and point-of-sale materials designed to encourage experimentation at the moment of purchase. Each execution reinforced the same message: there is no single right way to enjoy Mariyka. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 59 out of 100, reflecting competent strategic thinking and consistent creative execution across a well-integrated multi-touchpoint rollout.
Brain Tank identified a behavioural insight as the engine of the Mariyka revamp. Internal tests conducted ahead of the 2024 campaign revealed that consumers across different demographic groups savoured the curd dessert in meaningfully different ways, and that this diversity of consumption habits had never been surfaced as a brand asset.
The strategic decision to lead with individual experience rather than product attributes gave PepsiCo a way to speak simultaneously to traditional and modern consumers — a dual-audience challenge common in established food and drink categories where brand equity is long-standing but cultural relevance must be actively maintained. In Ukraine, where curd desserts hold a familiar place in the everyday diet, the risk of a revamp is always over-correction: move too far toward contemporary aesthetics and the existing loyal base feels alienated; stay too close to heritage positioning and the brand appears static to younger buyers. Brain Tank navigated this tension by making personal eating style the common ground between both audiences.
The global dairy-desserts market provides useful context for the strategic stakes. According to skyquestt.com, the global dairy-desserts market was estimated at approximately USD 102.74 billion in 2024. According to cargill.com, approximately 78 percent of global dairy-dessert volume is sold in Europe, making the European market — and Ukraine within it — a commercially critical geography for any brand operating in this category. Against that backdrop, Mariyka's revamp was not a cosmetic refresh but a deliberate attempt to secure relevance in a competitive, high-volume market.
Mariyka operates in a category where local and regional competitors maintain strong emotional connections with consumers. The brand's closest competitive pressure comes from established Eastern European dairy and curd-dessert producers who have similarly long histories in the market. PepsiCo's advantage lies in its ability to apply structured brand-building methodology — the four-scenario creative framework being a direct example — to a product that might otherwise rely on heritage alone. Brain Tank had already demonstrated its understanding of the Mariyka consumer through the 2023 "Spin spin and drink!" campaign, which targeted younger audiences through modern filming techniques and contemporary visual language, as documented by Pepsico-Promo Com Ua. The 2024 revamp extended that strategic continuity into the core curd dessert line.
Creative Director Andrii Franchuk led the Mariyka revamp at Brain Tank. The campaign's creative premise dismantled a seemingly fixed convention — that curd desserts are eaten with a spoon — and replaced it with an open invitation to experiment, positioning Mariyka as a product with as many expressions as the people who eat it.
The centrepiece of the creative execution is a 15-second television commercial that presents four distinct lifestyle scenarios. Each scenario depicts a different consumer segment engaging with Mariyka in a way that feels authentic to their habits and context. The brevity of the format demanded precision: every second of screen time had to carry both product visibility and emotional character. Rather than attempting a single aspirational narrative, the commercial operates as a rapid mosaic of real consumer moments, allowing viewers to locate themselves within the brand's world.
Head of Design Andriy Kotlyar and Graphic Designer Lada Kvitka were responsible for the visual identity work that underpins the campaign's key visual — an image designed to function across both outdoor billboard formats and the compressed real estate of social media feeds. The ability of a single image to hold its communicative power across those two very different contexts is a meaningful craft achievement, particularly given the campaign's need to feel contemporary without abandoning the warmth associated with the Mariyka name.
Copywriters Ilya Bozhko and Yulia Chernysheva shaped the verbal language of the campaign, while Account Manager Anatolii Rizon oversaw the client relationship across a multi-touchpoint rollout that included billboards, social media, television, and point-of-sale materials. The point-of-sale work is particularly significant in the food and drink category, where the moment of physical product encounter is often where brand messaging either consolidates or collapses. Brain Tank treated that touchpoint as an extension of the creative idea rather than a logistical afterthought, using it to actively prompt consumer experimentation at the shelf.
No independently verified third-party performance data for the 2024 Mariyka revamp campaign is publicly available at the time of writing. The campaign's stated objective — repositioning Mariyka as a contemporary brand while retaining its connection with traditional and modern consumers — provides the structural benchmark against which its effectiveness can be assessed.
From a structural standpoint, the campaign deploys several mechanisms associated with durable brand revitalization. The four-scenario format directly addresses the dual-audience challenge by multiplying points of identification within a single creative idea, reducing the risk that any one consumer group feels excluded. The consistency of the creative platform across billboards, television, social media, and point-of-sale materials suggests a disciplined approach to integrated communication, where each touchpoint reinforces rather than contradicts the central message.
Brain Tank's own description of the outcome, as documented on Braintank Ua, frames the result in terms of brand transformation: Mariyka evolved from a beloved product into a brand that unites people through taste, creativity, and experimentation. That language reflects a meaningful shift in strategic positioning — from product-centric communication toward a brand identity anchored in consumer experience and self-expression.
The campaign also benefits from clear creative lineage. As recorded on pepsico-promo.com.ua, Brain Tank's 2023 "Spin spin and drink!" campaign for Mariyka established the agency's familiarity with the brand's consumer base, meaning the 2024 revamp was built on accumulated knowledge rather than a cold start. That continuity of agency relationship is itself a structural advantage, reducing the interpretive distance between strategic insight and creative output. The Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its brief with competence and integration, without producing the kind of singular creative statement that drives scores into higher territory.
PepsiCo's Mariyka revamp is a 2024 brand revitalization campaign created by Brain Tank in Kyiv. It repositioned Mariyka curd desserts as a contemporary brand across Ukraine and multinational Europe using four lifestyle scenarios, a 15-second TV commercial, billboards, social media, and point-of-sale materials published in August 2024.
Internal testing revealed that consumers enjoy Mariyka curd desserts in distinctly individual ways. Some use different spoon sizes, others pair the product with biscuits, and others eat directly from the lid. Brain Tank used this behavioural insight to build a campaign centred on personal eating style as a form of self-expression.
Andrii Franchuk served as Creative Director on the Mariyka revamp. Andriy Kotlyar led design as Head of Design, with Lada Kvitka as Graphic Designer. Ilya Bozhko and Yulia Chernysheva worked as Copywriters, and Anatolii Rizon served as Account Manager across the full multi-touchpoint campaign.
The Mariyka revamp ran across four media channels. Brain Tank produced a 15-second television commercial, a key visual deployed on billboards and social media, and point-of-sale materials. The integrated rollout was designed to reinforce a single creative message — that there is no single right way to enjoy Mariyka — at every consumer touchpoint.
The 2023 "Spin spin and drink!" campaign launched Mariyka drinking yogurts and targeted younger consumers through modern filming techniques and contemporary settings. The 2024 revamp addressed the full Mariyka curd dessert range, bridging traditional and modern consumers through four lifestyle scenarios and a broader multi-generational creative platform.
The Mariyka brand revamp by PepsiCo and Brain Tank received a Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100. The score reflects competent strategic thinking and consistent integration across television, outdoor, social media, and point-of-sale, without the singular creative breakthrough that typically drives scores into higher-performing territory.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
