Mobile streaming platform Quibi has already sold out 12 months of ad inventory before its April launch and PepsiCo is among those companies anticipating that appearing on the new platform can help its brands augment their cultural cachet – and effectively reach Millennials.

“More so than ever before, consumers’ expectations are that brands will start to anticipate emerging trends, these cultural shifts, these moments that move us,” Adam Harter, PepsiCo’s svp/sports media and entertainment, told delegates at CES 2020.

“And the expectation is that brands will show up there – and they’ll show up there in ways that are impactful, that are authentic and, importantly, in ways that are non-invasive,” he continued.

“We’re constantly striving to keep those brands at the forefront of culture, and continuously looking for opportunities to innovate and how we tell those brand stories.” (For more details, read WARC’s report: PepsiCo seeks early-adopter benefits from tapping premium mobile advertising on Quibi.)

Quibi ticks those boxes. It not only has big names on board, like Steven Spielberg and Zac Efron, it also has a cutting-edge approach to making content, with viewers getting a different experience for many shows depending on whether they hold their phone horizontally (for a cinematic perspective) or vertically (when the character’s phone takes over the viewer’s phone).

That kind of innovation is helping Quibi position itself as a next-generation streaming hub. And Harter believes that for PepsiCo brands like Mountain Dew, as well as its eponymous cola line, an association with this pioneering service can deliver a halo effect.

Importantly for PepsiCo, Quibi’s non-skippable pre-roll spots of six, ten or 15 seconds, also open up a new route to millennials, an audience hard to reach either through legacy media or ad-free streaming properties like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

More specifically, the platform’s main target audience is 25-35-year-olds, with a potential larger demographic of 18–44-year-olds. And its intended usage time falls between 7am and 7pm, as people snack on content while on their commute, during their lunch hour, and so on.

“I think, like most advertisers, we’ve found it challenging to reach Millennials during that on-the-go moment,” said Harter. “That's really Quibi’s sweet spot.”

It’s one that Whitman expects will enable the startup to move into profit in little over two years. She told Axios that most subscribers will probably buy the ad-supported tier at $4.99/month rather than the ad-free version at $7.99.

Sourced from WARC, Axios