Pepsi on the Caribbean Coast: A Beach Lifestyle Campaign in Colombia

Behind a sun-drenched Pepsi lifestyle campaign shot between Santa Marta and Cartagena — beach volleyball, open-top jeeps and turquoise pools, with the product riding along instead of leading.

A global soda brand on a Colombian beach is a very specific assignment. Pepsi does not need anyone to explain what it tastes like; what it buys from a photographer is a feeling — the particular looseness of a day by the water with your favourite people. This campaign, shot between Santa Marta and Cartagena, was about bottling that feeling in frames.

The Caribbean coast is generous to lifestyle work. The light is warm and long, the water runs from teal to deep blue, and the culture genuinely lives outdoors. My job was to organise all of that generosity into images with a clear commercial read: friendship, energy, refreshment, repeat.

Building scenes, not poses

We built the campaign as a set of scenes you could walk into: friends piling out of an open-top jeep, a beach volleyball game at full stretch, a couple alone on a pier at golden hour, an afternoon dissolving into a pool. Each scene was cast, propped and blocked — and then played loosely enough that real laughter could interrupt the plan.

That balance is the whole craft of big-brand lifestyle photography. The frame has to be polished, because it will run everywhere from billboards to bus stops; the people in it have to look like they forgot the shoot was happening. You direct the setup, not the smile.

Energy you can freeze

The volleyball frames carry the campaign's energy. A leap at the net, sand in the air, six bodies in motion against a hard blue sky — action gives a soft drink something to be the answer to. I shot those sequences the way I shoot sport, anticipating the peak of the jump rather than chasing it, keeping the sun high and the shadows crisp.

Then the tempo drops on purpose. The couple on the pier at sunset is the exhale after the game — quieter light, warmer palette, the product almost incidental. A campaign needs both registers, because a brand wants to own the whole day at the beach, not just the loudest hour of it.

“The product doesn't lead a lifestyle campaign. It rides along with people having the best day of their summer.”

The coast as a collaborator

Colombia's Caribbean coast has been a recurring set for my beverage work. The palette practically art-directs itself: painted boats, bright swimwear, turquoise water, that unmistakable coastal yellow-gold light in the late afternoon. It is the same coast where I shot Cerveza Águila in Cartagena, and both campaigns lean on the same truth — the place already behaves the way brands wish people would.

Working here also means working with heat, salt and spray, which is its own discipline: gear wrapped and wiped constantly, batteries melting through their charge, casting kept hydrated and shaded between takes. The relaxed look of a beach campaign is built on a very unrelaxed production.

What a global brand takes home

A campaign like this delivers range from a single production: high-energy action, romantic dusk, poolside play, road-trip freedom. That spread is exactly what beverage brands need across a season of media, and it is the reason the Cerveza Andina campaign was built the same way — many worlds, one shoot.

These are some of the frames from those days on the coast: the jeep, the volleyball, the pier at golden hour, and the pool that ended every afternoon. Sun, friends, something cold — the oldest promise in advertising, kept honestly.