He’s the plumber, and he’s here to unclog your pipes.
And yes, that is a wrench in his pocket, and he is glad to see you, mostly because he’s lusting after your Doritos Golden Sriracha chips.
Walton Goggins—the Emmy-nominated White Lotus actor who’s seemingly everywhere at once these days—stars as “The Plumber” in a new short film for the PepsiCo brand that parodies cheesy XXX-rated flicks.
The video, a slick production clocking in at nearly four minutes, overflows with stereotypes of the porn genre, circa 1972, including characters like “The Bombshell” and “The Cougar,” along with skintight clothing, shag carpets, seductive stares, and double entendres.
The work, a first collaboration between Rethink New York and PepsiCo, aims squarely at a Gen Z audience that’s likely unfamiliar with the decades-old source material but may get the joke anyway, according to Chris Bellinger, chief creative officer of PepsiCo Foods U.S.
Though it could be considered a risk for being risqué, Bellinger said the concept from Rethink immediately scored with the brand teams. It was just a matter of degrees.
“The big conversation was about how far we go, where’s too far, where’s not far enough?” Bellinger said. “With our tagline being ‘For the Bold,’ if we don’t take a big swing, we’re not living up to our own hype.”
The product itself, trend-right with its swicy combo of sweet and spicy ingredients, inspired the creative. The new chip flavor has a kick “without being overly ambitious on the spice level,” Bellinger said. “So we were going for spice lite in the content—what can we do that’s rooted in the strategy of the flavor, a true insight, and not be overly explicit?”
While brands in the PepsiCo conglomerate often work with internal creative division D3, which produced north of 20 campaigns in 2024, they also collaborate with outside agencies. Doritos, for the revival of Crash the Super Bowl in February after a 10-year hiatus, brought in Goodby Silverstein & Partners and The Marketing Arm, while D3 handled social.
