He who laughs with 7Up donates $7 to a local charity, as the PepsiCo brand is setting up a Laughter Cube at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal from July 17 to 25.

In its second year of sponsorship, the brand wanted to do something different at its new location on Rue St. Denis in downtown Montreal, explains Manon Lavallée, director of 7Up marketing at PepsiCo Beverages Canada. The 7Up zone will feature a booth where visitors can see a few jokes by Comedian Yvon Deschamps, who is also president of the Association sportive et communautaire du Centre-Sud (ASCCS), and their laugh will be video recorded. The brand will donate $7 to ASCCS, a community organization that sponsors sports and activities for locals, but it will also dispense to visitors a printed message to check themselves out on YouTube later that night.

‘In everything we are doing, with consumer activations, we will now more and more promote the 7up YouTube page,’ Lavallée tells MiC, about the social media effort that launched about three weeks ago. She adds that the hope is for the brand to build a following on YouTube before launching a broader digital strategy in the near future. 7Up’s target demo is between the ages of 25 and 49, and it is popular almost equally among male and female consumers, she adds.

There will be two booths set up on location during the festival – the second will encourage participants to visit the Laughing Cube, with on-site brand ambassadors. Lavallée hopes that there will be about 1,500 laughs recorded in the laughter chain. The sponsorship was arranged internally in partnership with Launch!, a division of CIM.