“Do Cool Sh*t.”: Inside D3, PespiCo Foods’ US In-House Agency

To Chris Bellinger, D3 is a band of “like-minded creative misfits” on a mission every day to live up to its motto of ‘Do Cool Sh*t’.

D3 is PepsiCo Foods US’s in-house creative agency that supports the biggest brands within the PepsiCo Foods US organisation. Within the last five years, the D3 team has grown from two to 140 staffers. It operates as a full 360 shop with responsibilities including traditional campaign and creative work, strategy, production, social, digital, cause and purpose within the Frito-Lay marketing department, and helping to push creative excellence throughout all PepsiCo Foods US brands with external agency partners.

Chris is its chief creative officer and has been part of D3 for more than six years. In a previous life, Chris spent almost 10 years at The Marketing Arm, so in his words, he’s definitely an ‘agency kid’ at heart. “One of the reasons I think D3 is so unique is that we’re able to partner directly with brand teams, which enables us to keep a pulse on consumers so we can move at the speed of culture,” says Chris. “If we come up with an idea, we can literally walk down the hall, find a brand person and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got an idea…’ and talk it out on why it works or doesn’t (or sucks).”

D3 as an entity was first conceptualised to elevate the creative IQ of the entire PepsiCo Foods company - something that initially got Chris interested in the opportunity. In the role, he feels free to really push for his brand partners to give prescriptive feedback in order to create more epic work. After all, they are all building something together and have the same goals, which Chris feels builds the trust needed to take some legitimately big swings. 

To do that, the agency works closely with the PepsiCo Foods marketing and brand teams in a number of ways, which includes a variety of roles that would be expected within the traditional and internal agency realm. There are times, says Chris, when the D3 team acts as an agency of record (AOR) for brands and others where they collaborate and partner with the external AOR and participate within the inter-agency team. 

“There isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to how the D3 team works with brands as each brand is uniquely different with different goals,” says Chris, “and an internal resource isn’t always the best solution for the brand or the business. But regardless of the designation, the team is willing to help with ideation, creative development, strategy, production needs and more, both independently and in support of the external agencies as partners.” For example, with social, D3 is the social AOR for the majority of brands within the Frito-Lay and Quaker businesses. This type of always-on collaboration allows D3 to move quickly on content and get direct feedback by simply walking down the hall to talk with key decision makers, Chris tells us.

“Our team is dedicated to always being on the pulse of culture,” he adds. “That said, in terms of reactive creativity, I have a love/hate relationship with the speed of social – you’re always one post away from death, but it’s the closest thing you can do every day to be in touch with the consumer.” Chris believes that the biggest part of striking the right balance of speed and creative success is a deep understanding of the brand and recognising what feels like the right content at the time from both brand and cultural relevance perspectives. “However,” he adds, “I’m a big believer of creative teams taking big swings when idea-sharing – it's easier to pull back than to push. There is nothing more fun than, ‘I love this, but we can’t do it like that; however, we could do it this way’.”

That said, D3’s creative chops stretch far wider than managing brands’ social creativity. The team is also responsible for far-reaching integrated campaigns and projects for advertising’s biggest stage, the Super Bowl. In fact, Chris was handling PepsiCo Foods Super Bowl ads prior to working within the company; he supported the iconic Doritos ‘Crash the Super Bowl’ programme – where Doritos invited fans to create their own big game ads between 2006-2016 – for 10 years. “It was extra exciting for me to bring this same big energy to D3 to create last year’s PopCorners’ campaign ‘Breaking Good’ – the better-for-you snack’s first foray onto the Super Bowl stage,” says Chris. “The Breaking Bad-related spot reprised the show in a truly genuine way. We had people working on the campaign that were die-hard Breaking Bad fans, which helped keep things authentic.

“Creating comprehensive large-scale campaigns for moments like the Super Bowl, the World Cup, holiday, NFL kickoff and more is a dream come true,” he adds. “Regardless of the size of the campaign, our priority is pushing creative excellence and creating campaigns that give consumers an emotional response – whether on the Super Bowl stage or on Instagram. It’s a privilege we don’t take lightly to touch people’s lives when working on the biggest brands in the world that have this level of scale.” Chris actually revealed in a LinkedIn post this week that Crash the Super Bowl is set for a return. 

From a production standpoint, D3 is supported by D3 Studios, a fully integrated, in-house production team with capabilities across directing, producing, filming, audio recording, editing and beyond. What started out as a one-person and one-camera production team that mostly shot out of small conference rooms has grown into an experienced team of 14 with a fully equipped studio built at D3’s headquarters in Plano, Texas. “They are fully immersed in the agency and work across brands for a variety of campaigns – whether it’s just shooting or if it’s an entire production with direction, editing, recording,” says Chris. “From shooting mini documentaries with a local chef for Doritos’ ‘SOLID BLACK’ campaign to a commercial shoot with the ‘GOAT’ Lionel Messi, the D3 Studios team can do it all.”

Speaking of GOATs, that Lionel Messi project for Lay’s is up there in Chris’s proudest moments from his time at D3. It was the brand’s official welcome of the Argentinian footballer to Inter Miami, so they created a campaign that showed a farmer shepherding 808 mostly CGI goats – one for each of Messi’s career goals — to form his face. 

Another key moment was when D3 did the first ever holiday spot that involved the entire Frito Lay portfolio. Entitled ‘My Favorite Things’, it featured Anna Kendrick and was the first really huge programme for the D3 team. “That made me think, ‘we are onto something special’. We can not only punch above our weight, but we can create best-in-class work,” says Chris. He adds that it really started to unlock a lot of opportunities both internally and externally. Right after, D3 started to do big NFL work with the  ‘Twas the Night Before Kick-Off’ and ‘Unretirement’ campaigns, culture breaker concepts like Lay’s Vodka and a lot of social activations that went ‘viral’.

Chris is also feeling good about 2024, which, he says, has been ‘huge’ for PepsiCo Foods’ brands and agency partners. “I can’t believe the sheer amount of things that have happened, just in nine months.”

D3 started out the year by releasing  ‘Groundhog Lay’s’ in collaboration with Maximum Effort and Kimmelot. Chris says that his creative brief was a text message and the whole thing came together in about two weeks’ time from idea to on air. “It really was surreal how seamlessly (and quickly) it all came together,” he says. “We captured eight captivating slightly different 30-second assets and cleverly wove together the timeless charm of Groundhog Day with the irresistible appeal of Lay’s flavour offerings.”

Right after that, they headed to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl where they introduced the world to Doritos Dinamita for its first-ever in-game commercial, starring the iconic feisty duo, Dina and Mita. “No matter how many Super Bowl campaigns I work on, it’ll never not be a proud moment for me to see one of our commercials on screen, during one of the biggest cultural events of the year,” says Chris.

More recently, D3 also announced a theatrical partnership between Fritos and the new Twisters film. The team saw the perfect opportunity to involve Fritos Flavor Twists because, well, the shape is already a twister. So, for the first time in Fritos history, D3 blended two flavours – Flamin' Hot and Tangy Ranch – together into one bag with an exclusive, limited-edition Fritos Twisters design.  

And then just last month, D3 announced that it is sending Doritos into outer space in partnership with St. Jude and Polaris Dawn. “I mean,” says Chris, “where else could you get to do all of that and more within a singular company in a calendar year? Beyond all of the campaigns that we’ve launched this year, I’m proudest of my team for continuing to produce this incredible breadth of work from their brains and bring it into the world.”

When it comes to leading and guiding his teams, Chris aims to be very open and transparent about issues around mental health. In fact, this year he openly posted on LinkedIn about imposter syndrome and how he feels everyone has a dose of it and it’s potentially, if managed correctly, not a terrible thing. 

“When you first start out in your career, you look at the bosses and CEOs and think that they can’t possibly doubt themselves. But the further along you get, you realise that many have that small kernel of questioning inside asking, ‘do I know what I’m doing?’,” says Chris. 

He realised that he wasn’t seeing a lot of senior leaders talking about the real elements of these roles and mental health and he wanted to be someone that was helping to open it up. “It’s taken a bit of time to be able to be this open about these things, but it’s extremely important to remember that we’re all human, we’re all going through things. 

“The more those people who are just starting out in their careers see this type of honesty from their leaders, the less alone they’ll feel and the more comfortable they’ll be showing up as their true selves.”