In Canada, the campaign features a series of “streeters." Diet Pepsi drinkers are asked if there’s anything about their youth they’d like to have back again. Responses include a Flock of Seagulls haircut, painted-on designer jeans, and a van decorated with paintings of scantily clad women. The wish is always granted but the results prove a disaster. In the first case, a tennis player can’t see a serve zinging toward his head because his hair is obscuring his view.

In the second, another Diet Pepsi drinker is proudly sporting a pair of skin-tight designer jeans—alas, they’re so tight and stilt-stiff that he falls down while trying to sit in a chair after meeting a client. He ends up clutching a bed headboard while his wife tries to extricate him from his demon denims.

Yet another Diet Pepsi consumer, this one driving a testosterone-fueled van, is seen dropping off his young children at various activities. Needless to say, he elicits dirty looks from lots of soccer moms along the way. Eighties pop tunes serve as the soundtrack for the campaign, and at the end of each spot, the consumer says, “Nah, I’ll stick with my Diet Pepsi.”

Says Chris Hamilton, PepsiCo’s director of marketing for carbonated beverages in Canada, “We have found that humor not only helps us communicate our messages but also helps us connect with consumers in a fun way. Humor helps to create an emotional connection with the consumer. The jeans spot gives consumers a moment to relive some carefree, spontaneous aspect of their youth. Diet Pepsi drinkers, driven by youthful liberation, relate to life’s more light-hearted and fun experiences.”

Rob Warren, director of the Asper Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, says the Canadian campaign is clearly playing on nostalgia.

“It’s the perfect campaign. It’s the right time to do it; it’s 20 years down the road. They’re trying to get [consumers] to relive their youth, which is what Pepsi has always done. Remember ‘the choice of a new generation’? The company has always positioned itself as the drink of choice for people who are younger and more exciting."

Warren adds that the combination of strong visuals and retro music makes this campaign sing on television. It’s also a chance for people who grew up in the eighties to chuckle at their own expense.

“You can look back and laugh and realize that some of that stuff wasn’t that great. We kind of yearn for [the things of our youth], but we don’t really want them because we realize now how ridiculous they were. We like to look back and say, ‘those were the days,’ ” Warren notes.

Renée Alexander is a freelance business and lifestyle writer based in Winnipeg, Canada.