One of the two combatants in the cola-wars battle that is to be waged on Sunday night during Super Bowl XLVII is trying to get an early jump on the other.
The PepsiCo Beverages division of PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company are to face off during the CBS broadcast of the game with commercials for three soft-drink brands. PepsiCo Beverages is to promote Pepsi-Cola, the sponsor of the halftime show, and Pepsi Next, while Coca-Cola will pitch its flagship Coca-Cola brand.
At 9 a.m. on Sunday, about nine and a half hours before kickoff, PepsiCo Beverages plans to unleash a comical video clip for Pepsi Next that tweaks the commercial planned during the game for Coca-Cola.
The Pepsi Next video will not run during the Super Bowl. Instead, it will be available for viewing on Funny or Die, the Web site known for humorous videos; the Pepsi Next Web site, pepsinext.com; and YouTube.
The video for Pepsi Next features characters dressed like cowboys, showgirls and motorcycle toughs — the types of characters who are to appear in the Coca-Cola Super Bowl spot. In the video, they all try to get cans of Pepsi Next out of a vending machine during a break in the filming of their Coca-Cola commercial while ignoring a Coca-Cola machine nearby.
In the Coca-Cola Super Bowl spot, which is to appear during the first quarter of the game, three groups of cowboys, showgirls and motorcycle toughs (called “badlanders” in the commercial) race across a desert to be the first to find a cold Coke.
Viewers are invited to vote for their favorite group on a Web site, cokechase.com, and the winner of the vote is to be announced in a Coca-Cola commercial scheduled to run after the game ends. (As of Saturday night, it appears that the showgirls and cowboys are neck and neck on cokechase.com.)
The commercial is to be the first part of a Coca-Cola campaign that will run after the Super Bowl and introduce additional characters as well as continue to tell stories about the cowboys, showgirls and badlanders.
The mocking plot of the Pepsi Next video clip is completely different from the plot of the commercial for Pepsi Next that is to appear during the first or second quarter of the Super Bowl. In the commercial, parents who come home unexpectedly to find their son hosting a wild party are distracted by cans of Pepsi Next, which is billed as offering real cola taste with 60 percent less sugar than Pepsi-Cola.
The video is intended to be “a playful and disruptive way” to draw attention to the Pepsi Next brand, Angelique Krembs, vice president for marketing for the Pepsi trademark at PepsiCo Beverages, said in a phone interview on Saturday night from New Orleans, where she was to attend the game.
Funny or Die has produced other humorous videos for Pepsi Next, she said, in connection with the Super Bowl commercial for the brand, and the video “is an extra little poke” at Coke.
For years, PepsiCo mocked Coca-Cola products in commercials for Pepsi-Cola. More recently, the company has assigned that task to other brands like Pepsi Max, which ran a commercial in the Super Bowl last year that made fun of Coke Zero.
Asked if she was worried that Coca-Cola might retaliate against the video before the game, Ms. Krembs replied, laughing, “Unless they’ve got a great-tasting product with 60 percent less sugar, I’d like to see what they have to say.”
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/pepsis-next-coke-parody-involves-pepsi-next/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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