Pulp

Concept

Pulp is not just any soft drink in Paraguay: it was founded by Dr Máximo Acosta Colmán in 1937, two years after the Chaco War ended, and the formula stayed untouched for decades. It is one of the few brands a Paraguayan associates with their own childhood and with their father's. A brand like that does not need to explain what it sells; it needs people to keep loving it. That is why neither site sells anything: both give away time.

"Crecemos cada día" turned the claim into a mechanic. Visitors register, plant a tree and from then on have to come back: every day the site gives them three tasks —feed it, fence it, water it— that are dragged onto the tree, and the tree really does grow from one day to the next. All the users' trees form a browsable forest, each with the name its owner gave it. In 2010, before "gamification" was a word said in meetings, that meant giving a soft-drink brand a reason for people to come back every day for weeks.

"Atracción" does something stranger still: it hands you the wheel. The site opens on an almost empty landscape —a kiskadee on a post, a bougainvillea branch, a blue butterfly— and the visitor drives Pulp's classic truck across the fields. There is no menu and there are no buttons: you drive, and when the truck reaches something, that something opens. The sections are not listed anywhere: they are in the landscape. It is the work that best shows I was already thinking in terms of product before that was my job: user accounts, persistent state and daily return, built for a soft drink, in 2010.