Battle Of The Brown Stuff

The cola wars ain’t overtil they’re over. And last week both Pepsi and Coca-Cola were firing new salvos in the never-ending battle of the brown stuff. At a time when sales in the $46 billion domestic soft-drink category are expanding at less than 3 percent annually, both cola makers are scrambling to broaden their niches with distinctly different marketing approaches. Aiming at foreign as well as domestic markets, Coke kicked off the battle two days before the big game with a 24-hour worldwide broadcast of five new Olympic spots and an ad called “Hellos.” Then, on the Super Bowl telecast, Pepsi launched its multimillion-dollar “Gotta Have It” campaign, a cameo-studded ad fest designed to reposition itself as a drink for all generations. Having once ridiculed Coke as the cola for the rest-home set, Pepsi is now attempting to woo older folks. “The cola wars only have one direction to go and that’s up,” says Tom Pirko, a Los Angeles beverage consultant. “It will be a year of Coke and Pepsi screaming at each other and the American public.”

The nation’s top cola makers have been screaming at one another almost as long as the Hatfields and the McCoys. But the marketing skirmish has escalated in the past year, with Pepsi turning up the heat on industry leader Coke. According to Video Storyboard Tests, which measures consumer reaction to LIAISON advertising, Pepsi’s ads have continued to rank No. 1 in viewer recall throughout the year, while Coke’s have placed fourth or fifth. Diet Pepsi’s “You’ve Got the Right One, Baby, Uh-huh,” which premiered on last year’s Super Bowl, also scored big. “After the 1991 Super Bowl, Pepsi took off on a tear,” says Pirko. “It hasn’t shown up in the numbers, but it told Pepsi they had new momenturn-a chance to dig in and close the gap.”

Both sides seem determined to fight until they drop. At McCann-Erickson, Coca-Cola’s advertising agency, executives traveIed the globe putting together “Hellos,” which is intended to reach as many as 3.8 billion viewers around the globe. Produced on three continents and broadcast on CNN and MTV, the spots include everyone from school girls in France to Buddhist monks in Thailand saying “hello” with a Coke. Most of the talent in “Hellos” are amateurs, not trained actors. To film one commercial, the creative team took a prop plane from Casablanca and landed on a strip in the Sahara with a mud hut for an airport terminal. Hundreds of “actors” never even made it into the final version of the ad; a scene with some 500 goats got left on the cutting-room floor. The folks who taught the world to sing hope the spot will help expand the market for Coca-Cola products overseas. Coke and Pepsi together command less than 15 percent of the soft-drink market in the former Soviet Union; other countries are even more wide open. Peter Sealey, Coke’s director of global marketing, hopes to remedy that: “The walls have come down,” he says. “Now we can take our advertising to virtually everywhere on earth.”

Pepsi is going to similarly extravagant lengths to broaden its market. Billed modestly by its creators as “bigger than anything” in television-commercial history, Pepsi’s “Gotta Have It” spots feature 700 actors, extras, dancers, technicians and production people, a big enough crew to produce some featurelength films. Recognizing the spending potential of the aging baby-boom population, Pepsi’s new ads attempt to shift the cola’s image from “the choice of a new generation” to that of a beverage for all age groups. The ads feature such hipsters as Downtown Julie Brown, along with a little old lady by her clothesline and Berra, among others. “We wanted to drive home the point that you don’t have to be a teenager or young to drink Pepsi,” says Lee Garfinkel, senior creative director for BBDO New York, Pepsi’s ad agency. “Anybody can be a member of the Pepsi generation.”

Will these brave new advertising exploits pay off? Some experts fear they may be a trifle confusing at first. “The Pepsigeneration ads almost blatantly said that Coke was for old fogeys,” says George Lois, chairman of Lois/USA. “Now they’re saying everyone’s gotta have Pepsi? It’s really just mental gymnastics”." If that’s not baffling enough, just hang around for a few months. “Coke tends to knock off whatever Pepsi does,” says Ken Mandelbaum of Mandelbaum Mooney Ashley, “and it soon gets hard to tell the two companies apart.” Or, as Yogi might say: when it comes to the cola wars, it’s like deja vu all over again.

PHOTO: Gotta have it? Pepsi ads with older woman (top) and Downtown Julie Brown (left), saying hello with a Coca-Cola in Africa (above)

Subject Terms: PEPSICO Inc.