David Beckham flaunts fake skills for Pepsi

This Pepsi video of David Beckham performing unlikely soccer tricks on the beach is very 2005 (see Ronaldinho's crossbar spot for Nike), but it's still more entertaining than the Diet Pepsi commercial he's making will be. Either he lowered his price tag or Pepsi's profit margins have improved, because I thought they parted ways three years ago. That aside, the consensus seems to be that the footage was heavily edited to enhance Beckham's already impressive skills, but hey, I was still impressed. I mean, I'm an out-of-shape guy on the Internet, so kicking a soccer ball barefoot is enough to earn my admiration.

Filed under Celebrity endorsements, Kiefaber, Pepsi, Soccer, Soda
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Diet Pepsi skinny can causes big fat ruckus

PepsiCo has stirred up a bit of a shitstorm with its new "skinny can" for Diet Pepsi, introduced during New York Fashion Week and made in "celebration of beautiful, confident women." Critics say the packaging just reinforces dangerous stereotypes that women must resemble beanpoles to be attractive. Possibly anticipating the outcry, the brand got Modern Family's Sofia Vergara, one of television's curviest stars, to model for the print ad shown here—but didn't do themselves any favors by making her almost unrecognizable. In any case, the solution is simple. Replace Vergara with Christina Hendricks, and add a head, arms, legs and a belly button to the can's logo—which will quickly reveal Pepsi's true love for the portly among us.

Filed under Controversy, Nudd, Packaging, Pepsi, Soda
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'Crash the Super Bowl' ad just a bit ungodly

Doritos' 3rd Degree Burn habanero-flavored chips might cause flaming tongues, but they're far from a religious experience. Thus begins my discussion of a controversy involving this year's "Crash the Super Bowl" ad contest from Frito-Lay and Pepsi. In the 60-second, consumer-created spot below, called "Feed The Flock," a priest gets divine inspiration to substitute Doritos chips and Pepsi Max for the body and blood of Christ during the Eucharist, and church attendance soars. Nothing questionable there, right? Catholics, still stinging from the bad publicity over the Spanish Inquisition, are playing the "blasphemy" card to gain maximum sympathy. I'd call it a Hail Mary for publicity, but that's the kind of dumb joke for which I'd have to ask forgiveness at my next confession. It's a bit of a moot point, as "Feed the Flock" didn't reach the finals of the contest (it's too well made and entertaining for that) and won't air on TV. Still, Frito-Lay has thus far refused to even pull the clip from the Web. They're already damned for all eternity for selling those colon-churning Cool Ranch chips, so keeping the spot online a while longer won't hurt.

Filed under Doritos, Frito-Lay, Gianatasio, Pepsi, Religion, Super Bowl
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Snoop Dogg wants Pepsi Max for Christmas

Man, it is every kind of weird seeing Snoop Dogg in an ugly holiday sweater. But if he's going to drop some Christmas science on us, which he does in this Pepsi Max commercial from TBWA\Chiat\Day, it's a necessary prop. Too bad his awesome Santa cape is wasted on the sex-in-a-canoe that is Pepsi Max. Speaking of the cape, one of YouTube's more prescient commenters proposed that Snoop would sell drugs from his magic sleigh if he were St. Nick, which is a pretty safe bet, but I'm more interested in seeing what he'd do to the stockings of people on his naughty list.

Filed under Celebrity endorsements, Holidays, Kiefaber, Pepsi, TBWA
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Oldsters try to get refreshed with Pepsi, too

It's nice to see old people show up in advertising, which notoriously ignores them in favor of impressionable youth. As it starts to push its Refresh Project abroad, Pepsi has cast a bunch of senior (or almost senior) citizens in the Web spot below, called "Join the Refresh." Alas, it might be nice if a commercial featuring those long in the tooth did more than just play to stereotypes. French shop CLM BBDO takes the easy route and goes for cheap laughs with a "We Are the World" reprise based on how old people can't see, bore the shit out of us with their travel photos and spend their days knitting scarves and feeding pigeons. I'm surprised there was no mention of incontinence. Via Best Ads on TV.

Filed under BBDO, Europe, Pepsi, Soda
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Drink Pepsi Max, really mess with your boss

While Americans are being forced to sit through TBWA's fizzless sequel to a 15-year-old Pepsi spot reimagined for Pepsi Max, the Chinese are being subjected to this self-consciously wacky commercial for the same brand. In the spot, from BBDO Shanghai, some office drones play an elaborate earthquake trick on the boss so they can knock off and watch a soccer game at the local bar. Their ruse is awfully industrious, but probably not what the government in Beijing has in mind for its workers. Here at AdFreak, I used to just call in sick, until HR got wise and adopted new policies. I don't mind the chains so much, but I wish they'd remember to refill the water dish.

Filed under BBDO, China, Food and drink, Gianatasio, Pepsi
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Pepsi joyfully crashing Africa's soccer party

You don't have to be a soccer fan to appreciate this warm-spirited spot for Pepsi Max. Set in Africa, which is hosting its first World Cup this summer (in South Africa), it pits several of the world's best players against a team with the ultimate home-field advantage. In addition to stars like Kaká, Lionel Messi, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba, the ad also has a cameo by Akon, whose charitable single "Oh Africa" serves as the soundtrack. The print work is colorful, too, with the players decked out in body paint. The only people who'll be grousing about this are the folks at Coca-Cola, the World Cup's supposedly exclusive soft-drink sponsor. 

—Posted by David Griner

Filed under Africa, Griner, Pepsi, Soccer
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What's with all the end-of-the-world ad sex?

You probably saw Bud Light's Super Bowl ad in which a planet-busting asteroid turns an observatory into a den of debauchery. But what I didn't know was that Pepsi Max also has an ad circulating where a bar erupts into chaos and carnal lust over news reports of—you guessed it—a planet-busting asteroid. You can watch it below, in all its predictable glory. Seeing as how both ads went live around the same time, it's hard to believe one stole the idea from another. But it does make you wonder why marketers are suddenly on a kick of deadly asteroids, a trend that reach its peak in the Deep Impact/Armageddon days of 1998.

—Posted by David Griner

Filed under Alcohol, Bud Light, Food and drink, Griner, Pepsi, Soda
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MacGruber disarms warheads with F-bombs

We're past the point of debating whether they should have made a movie out of Saturday Night Live's MacGruber. It's a done deal, as you can see in the obscenity-speckled trailer posted below. Viewers seem pretty divided, with some saying it's going to be all-caps AWESOME and others noting that it's an idiotic spinoff from an idiotic sketch/Pepsi Super Bowl commercial. If these are the best clips they could pull, I'd say it doesn't bode well for this movie breaking SNL's consistent track record of flops. I'm guessing the flick will succeed only in sparking an epidemic of delinquents crapping in toilet tanks. Via Mashable.

—Posted by David Griner

Filed under Griner, Movies, Pepsi, Super Bowl
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CBS embeds 40-minute video ad inside 'EW'

CBS and Pepsi Max are embedding a video player in a print ad for the fall-TV-preview issue of Entertainment Weekly in September. That's right, it's a TV commercial inside a magazine. And it's a 40-minute commercial, consisting of clips from shows on CBS's fall schedule. They're calling it "the first-ever VIP (video-in-print) promotion." Opening the page pulls a little mechanism that causes the commercial to start after a five-second loading delay. Which gives you exactly enough time to think, "What the heck is with that tiny screen?" The video device is a quarter-inch thick and seen through a die cut that conceals a larger circuit board. The whole effect is considerably more impressive than the e-ink cover of Esquire last year. Of course, due to the high cost, only a small number of issues in New York and Los Angeles will carry the ad. As a stunt, it's extremely effective. As a new form of media, it's dead out of the water without some more interactivity. It's too bad it can't respond to its environment and work together with an out-of-home campaign. But the future is coming. This is just one small step for media technology, but one giant leap toward my dream of auto-updating periodicals that can respond to nearby ads.

—Posted by Rebecca Cullers

Filed under CBS, Cullers, Magazines, Pepsi, Television
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MacGruber movie is sure to be a work of art

He couldn't survive 30 seconds in an oil refinery, or 30 days on Twitter after the Super Bowl, but Saturday Night Live character and Pepsi pitchman MacGruber (played by Will Forte) is getting his own feature film. Yep, that's right. They've begun production on a full-length MacGruber movie packed with mullets, meta '80s references and ... what else could they possibly put in there? Lots of obscenity, if you ask SNL star Bill Hader, who read the script and called it a "hard-R comedy." As SlashFilm notes, that would make MacGruber one of the only R-rated SNL movies since The Blues Brothers. (The Ladies Man was also R.) Why go the raunchy route? Maybe they figure kids will be tempted to sneak into an "adult" comedy, thereby creating the only audience on earth who would willingly go see a MacGruber movie.

—Posted by David Griner

Filed under Griner, Pepsi, SNL
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Jackson hair-on-fire footage finally unveiled

Video footage of one of advertising's seminal moments has finally been leaked 25 years later—that of Michael Jackson's hair catching on fire, due to mistimed pyrotechnics, at a 1984 shoot for a Pepsi ad by BBDO. See the video here, which Us Weekly released exclusively this week. The accident at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. on Jan. 27, 1984, left the pop star with serious burns and allegedly kick-started his addiction to prescription drugs.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Filed under BBDO, Michael Jackson, Nudd, Pepsi, Vintage
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Pepsi Throwback ads resurrect 1970s relics

Here are nine new 15-second spots from TBWA\Chiat\Day that Pepsi unveiled today to promote Pepsi Throwback, its nostalgia beverage featuring '70s product packaging and, to my personal delight, real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. The retro theme extends to the media buy, as the ads are running on Hulu alongside old shows like Hill Street Blues, Battlestar Galactica (the original) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The spots are pretty amusing, showing the Throwback can interacting with artifacts from the '70s. But Pepsi's notion that the '70s are "considered new" because millennials weren't around to experience them the first time ignores the fact that the '70s have been mined for nostalgia for years now. Also worrisome: Three other ads were made in conjunction with the folks at CollegeHumor.com, who wouldn't know funny if it flashed them and took a picture. But at least Pepsi is stepping up and producing ads to fit Hulu's specialty content. That alone makes them look like they have a clue.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Filed under Food and drink, Kiefaber, Pepsi, Soda, TBWA, Vintage
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Drink Pepsi and climb to the summit of rock

CLM BBDO in France (which won a Grand Clio yesterday for this Alka-Seltzer print campaign) created this new Pepsi spot, in which a young man, thirsty for glory, ignores the advice of teachers, parents and employers and scales all obstacles in pursuit of his dream ... of being a rock star. This involves a literal climbing of giant objects. He's good at that, anyway, so if he ends up being terrible at music and feeling a Tenacious-D-like cosmic shame, he can always try a career in professional rock climbing.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Filed under BBDO, Europe, Nudd, Pepsi
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Are the Super Bowl brands still on Twitter?

Last month, we wondered how long all those Super Bowl ad characters would last on Twitter. The answer was a bit surprising, if only because the personality with the highest potential—the mulleted and inventive PepSuber—was one of the first to drop off. The Pepsi-SNL crossover character quickly racked up over 1,000 followers but abruptly stopped posting on Feb. 24. H&R Block's Tax Guy Murray, the man threatened with death for boning up the Grim Reaper's taxes, deserves credit for playing out his ad's story line. On the day of his supposed passing, March 11, Murray posted a flurry of updates about when Death came calling. (Don't worry, Murray escaped unharmed.) The spammy but prolific E*Trade Baby has kept up his shtick pretty consistently. But strangely, it's SoBe Lifewater that takes top honors with its Sobeworld account, which has the most followers (1,196) and has been impressively interactive with other users. Sadly, this probably means we're in for another 10 years of dancing lizards.

—Posted by David Griner

Filed under E*Trade, Griner, H&R Block, Pepsi, SoBe, Super Bowl, Twitter
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Pepsi logo fulfills God's plan for humanity

Remember when the new Pepsi logo debuted a few months back, fulfilling 5,000 years of aesthetic philosophy and epitomizing our relationship with the cosmos? No? Well, it happened. An internal document from the Arnell Group has made its way online, illustrating the copious and absurd rationalizations (PDF file) behind the firm's redesign of the logo. There's discussion of the Earth's magnetic fields, the Theory of Relativity and all sorts of other cockamamie horseshit that shows how Arnell is   "applying universal laws to establish a blueprint for the brand." Fast Company describes it a bit differently: "One of the most ridiculous things ever perpetrated by somebody calling himself a designer." But hey, if you're hired for an obscene amount of money and all you do is smash together the logos for Barack Obama and Korean Air, it doesn't hurt to defend your decision as the manifest destiny of humanity's creative endeavor. Via Gawker.

—Posted by David Griner

Filed under Arnell Group, Design, Griner, Pepsi
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Will the Super Bowl brands stay on Twitter?

Laptop keyboards nationwide are stained with wing sauce and nacho cheese following the intensive Twittering of Sunday's Super Bowl. But it wasn't just football and advertising fans doing the talking. Brands themselves used the popular social site to get characters from their commercials chatting with viewers in real time. Results were mixed at best. I actually found that PepSuber's Twitter banter somewhat redeemed Pepsi's strange Saturday Night Live crossover ad, especially when he corrected my misspelling in a post by offering to make the missing letter out of a paperclip. H&R Block, a veteran brand on Twitter, gets a passing score for its TaxGuyMurray account, which chronicles Murray's brush with death in the ad itself. Then there's the E*Trade Baby, who basically just spammed everyone. But here's my real question: What's going to happen to these accounts? The three I just mentioned were still active on Monday, but how long will their corporate overlords keep it up? Will these little-loved characters be quietly abandoned one day when they've lost all their cultural novelty? Not that I doubt the lasting power of PepSuber, but come on, he didn't even survive his own Super Bowl commercial.

—Posted by David Griner

Filed under E*Trade, Griner, H&R Block, Pepsi, Super Bowl, Twitter
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Diet Pepsi knows the limits of youthfulness

Partners Film's Joachim Back directed these Canadian Diet Pepsi spots for BBDO in Toronto. The tag: "Forever young." The premise: Diet Pepsi drinkers are asked, "Is there anything else youthful you'd like to experience?" The guys initially dream about stepping back in time to enjoy a sleepover (above, in which one guy is beaten senseless with a pillow) and recess (below, where another guy gets wedgied). They quickly reconsider. As average as these commercials are, I actually prefer them to the Coca-Cola-esque happy-happy approach taken by newly crowned U.S. Pepsi shop TBWA\Chiat\Day. For one thing, BBDO resurrects Huey Lewis's "Hip to Be Square" in the "Recess" spot, which beats the Apples in Stereo jangle-pop of TBWA's effort by a mile. Also, frankly, it was cathartic to see someone else get a wedgie for a change. Some wounds never heal.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Filed under BBDO, Food and Drink, Gianatasio, Pepsi
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The flip side of Pepsi's 'Dear Mr. President'

Is Pepsi's "Dear Mr. President" YouTube campaign simply a refreshed version of the "Farewell Mr. President" YouTube series from last year? Greg Olliver, the currently pissed-off creator of the latter, thinks so. He just came across the Pepsi effort by R/GA, which encourages citizens to film little love notes to President Obama. In his earlier campaign, Olliver filmed citizens offering little non-love notes to President Bush. "From the way Pepsi's videos are shot, the editing, the 'Dear Mr. President' opening, to the ENTIRE CONCEPT ... it appears to be a complete rip-off of my idea," Olliver tells us. Possibly so. Whatever the case, it's a pleasant reminder that America didn't just welcome a new president today—it got rid of an old one.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Filed under Barack Obama, Nudd, Pepsi, R/GA
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Pepsi and its celebrities glom on to Obama

It's inevitable, considering President-Elect Obama's approval rating is hovering at 70 percent, that marketers want in on the action. Pepsi is pulling out all the stops. It's combining its newfound Obamaphilia with its longtime obsession with celebrity in a series of "Dear Mr. President" videos. Deep thinkers like Desperate Housewives hottie Eva Longoria, Nascar driver Jeff Gordon and quintessential Obama brand celeb hanger-on Will.i.Am are featured in the call for submissions. They're promising an "open letter" video montage from Americans to Obama, courtesy of the soda giant. (Let's hope Obama not only doesn't heed calls to Twitter while president but also skips watching user-generated ads.) R/GA created the videos.

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

Filed under Barack Obama, Morrissey, Pepsi
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What some people won't do to get a Pepsi

Pepsi made headlines last month for canning (ha!) BBDO. The Omnicom Group shop might be off the domestic account of the beverage brand it helped shape for five decades, but the agency retains chores overseas. These ads by CLM BBDO in Paris help explain why. Who needs TBWA\Chiat\Day? The message is so clear, the work could run stateside without translation. OMG, that chimp's gonna drive off with a truckload of bananas because he gave the driver a Pepsi! OMG, that geek'll give mouth-to-mouth to an unconscious beach babe because he traded the hunky lifeguard a Pepsi! Yeah, humor this sophomoric seems positively American. C'est si bon! Via Ads of the World. 

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Filed under BBDO, Food and Drink, Gianatasio, Pepsi
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Diet Pepsi will meet you at the Peach Pit

So Diet Pepsi is using characters from Beverly Hills 90210 to illustrate how people prefer it to Diet Coke. But why? Not only is this a forced regurgitation of pop culture, it isn’t even current pop culture. 90210 went off the air seven years ago in a freefall after everyone who made the show popular jumped ship. Maybe I’m being too mean. Yes, the ad ridicules 90210. But even that strategy feels stale. And surely it isn’t time yet for a ’90s pop-culture revival. Maybe the guilty parties here got into Lindsay Lohan’s Panamanian Fairy Dust before putting pen to paper.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Filed under 90210, DDB, Kiefaber, Pepsi
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