CANNES: PepsiCo, the food and beverage manufacturer, believes its new in-house studio – called the Creators League – could soon help its major brands "fund their own marketing" by selling content to media companies.

Brad Jakeman, President/Global Beverage Group at PepsiCo, jointly oversees the operation of the organisation's fledgling content facility, which was unveiled in May 2016, and is based in New York City.

"My ultimate goal is for our billion-dollar brands to actually fund their own marketing, so that we leverage the equity of the brand to produce content which we then sell [and] which we can then put back into the marketing for those brands," he said. (For more, read Warc's exclusive report: How PepsiCo drives content (and profits) with in-house play.)

Although this unit is still in its nascent stages of development, Jakeman revealed that the early signs are extremely positive for PepsiCo.

"The content center has only been open for three months, but we think we have a line of sight towards becoming a double-digit million-dollar business in the next three years," he said.

As hinted at by these provisional figures, the Creators League has the potential to turn PepsiCo into a significant seller of media, not just a buyer of it.

"One part of the content centre is actually leveraging our brands to produce content, which we then sell to media platforms," Jakeman said.

"And it's a very interesting thing, because it changes the relationship we have with the media from people to buy media to a company that sells content."

That process is facilitated by the financial muscle and unique marketing assets possessed by PepsiCo's slate of billion-dollar brands, according to Jakeman.

"Some of those brands – like Pepsi, and Doritos, and Gatorade – are really themselves enormous platforms for content," he explained.

"Imagine if you could watch behind the scenes of the NFL through Gatorade, [and] content that was created by Gatorade. Imagine if you could watch a series around how the half-time show was created, produced by Pepsi."

Data sourced from Warc