The Situation
Mtn Dew and Papa John's wanted to reach gamers with a Q4 promotion, bundling the Papadias menu innovation and a 20 ounce Mtn Dew behind a gaming culture moment built around Doctor Disrespect and Jamal Murray. The offer itself was straightforward. The harder problem sat underneath it: how do you target that audience precisely, across two brands and a media partner, without handing raw consumer data back and forth between organizations that had every reason not to trust each other with it? This would be breaking new ground for both parties.
PepsiCo had the customer behavior and data to solve this. What it didn't have yet was a proven way to use it inside a live partnership campaign and protect the customer data.
The Stakes
Get the targeting wrong and you're back to buying broad reach and hoping gamers are somewhere in it, which means paying full price for a lot of waste. Get the data sharing structure wrong and you create a partnership liability that outlasts the campaign, the kind of thing that makes the next joint promotion harder to sign off on, not easier. The sell in would be an uphill battle. We invested to learn what was possible.
What I Did
Identified the actual constraint.
The blocker wasn't audience size or creative. It was architecture: no clean way existed yet to target precisely across a brand partnership without exposing one party's data to another.
Built a first to market clean room approach.
I led the effort to structure a clean room media targeting model using PepsiCo's U.S. Consumer DNA dataset, 30 million households deep, so the campaign could target the right audience without the underlying data ever changing hands.
Ran it live inside the Papa John's / Mtn Dew “Power Up, Play On” promotion.
The Doctor Disrespect and Jamal Murray gaming tie in gave the campaign cultural relevance. More importantly, the clean room targeting is what made the media spend behind it so efficient in what was typically Q4 sales challenges except for holidays, even during Covid.
The Result
Beverage volume grew 13.5%. The campaign generated $1 million in incremental revenue, on media that worked harder because it was finally reaching the right households who craved deals and new flavors. We were no longer guessing at what would work and for whom.
Why It Matters
Every large company sitting on a first party data asset eventually runs into the same wall: the data is valuable, but using it inside a partnership means trusting someone else with it, or finding a structure that doesn't require that trust in the first place. Most teams treat that as a legal problem and stall out waiting for someone else to solve it.
This was a growth problem before it was a legal one. Solving the architecture is what let the audience, the creative, and the media budget finally work together instead of around each other. That's the same instinct behind every engagement with JDR Growth Advisory: find the real constraint, even when it's not the one everyone's staring at, before you spend another dollar trying to buy your way out of it.
We showed up for our biggest brand fans exactly where they were demonstrated to our 3rd largest global pizza foodservice partner that we could accelerate sales by flavor pairings.
Is this your problem? Start with a 30 minute call. If the fit is wrong, I'll tell you on the call.
