Pepsi Not Advertising in Super Bowl Next Year

That's because Pepsi spent all their money up here sponsoring a contest to come up with a National Hockey Cheer

http://i.tsn.ca/world_jrs/story/?id=295706


After more than five weeks and over 1,100 entries from across Canada, the top three submissions to Join the Cheer, a movement by Pepsi, Gatorade and Hockey Canada to develop a national hockey cheer, has just been announced. Now it's up to Canadians who have from October 19 - November 1 to choose Hockey Canada's new official cheer.

http://www.pepsi.ca/default.aspx?bhcp=1#/en/entertainment/JoinTheCheer

That's great. What's next, a national anthem sponsored by Orville Redenbacher?

Anyway, I'm not sure about the strategy of dropping the SB ads. But up here, we don't get them. Have to sit through boring fucking ads we've seen 100 times before

 

Direct mail has always been pretty much the ONLY form of advertising you can quantify--even before the days of the internet.

You knew beforehand that if you got your typical 1 1/2% or 2% response rate, you'd need to sell X units to break even.

My former biz partner and I had a separate division within our bookstore that just did direct mail (this is back in the 70's and 80's). We bought lists or scoured trade journals to make up our own. We made a shitload of money on it.

 

As far as I'm concerned, the people who invented the sweet nectar that is Mountain Dew can do no wrong.

 

Pepsi lost its way when it tried to market Nuka-Cola Quantum.

 

Fucking junk mail! (email and otherwise)

 

Yankee Fan, you are right, but there are a great many products and services which really aren't suited for direct mail advertising, because the target market is too vast. Pepsi, for example. Who's going to open an e-mail about Pepsi?

 

Agree that's it's the perfect venue for a product launch.

But, also think it works for highly competitive, commodity type products like beer, snack chips or soft drinks. Through a clever commerical and some brand development, if you can get some segment of the Joe Consumer population to switch his order at the bar or the six pack he picks up in the liquor store from Miller Lite to Bud Light, it's worth it.

Same could be said for switching from Coke to er.....

 

100%. Similarly, lot's of products are better suited for direct mail than advertising.

I used to buy sports sponsorships for a major airline. Teams always assumed we'd spend big money "because we had it". We were a big company.

But they didn't understand our needs. We didn't just want "eyeballs" or "awareness". We weren't selling candy bars, soda pop, or other low priced impulse purchases.

And advertising doesn't drive leisure travel, price does.

We needed to reach business travels. People that purchased high fares and had a choice of airlines. Our demo was very specific.

Once we threw the team's presentation in the garbage, we'd make our own presentation to them asking for exactly what we wanted -- from tickets, to access, to promos and use of logos & marks.

Direct mail, targets advertising and promotions worked for us.

I will add, that when we had a big announcement, a major new route (to Europe or Asia) for example, we bought ads in the Times, USA Today, and the Journal. And we often had the ad placed in the sports section because we could get better placement, there wasn't a lot of clutter, and we reached our audience.

 

Intriguing to contrast the consensus opinion around here on, say, crowdsourcing journalism vs. the assumption that professional in many other fields are idiots who don't know what they are doing.

 

Ah...a Fallout 3 fan. But I always thought that Nuka-Cola was a take-off on Coca-Cola. Kind of looked similar, I thought.

 

When I was in sports marketing, we were the official airline of a lot of big organizations -- the NCAA, the Yankees, etc.

I was excited to work with these marketing geniuses and to learn from them.

Turns out, most were idiots. The NCAA especially. Arrogant & not interested in helping you meet your marketing objectives.

The best that I dealt with: The New York Road Runners, the owners of the New York City Marathon. A little non-profit, but smart and willing to work with you. Nothing was dismissed out of hand.

The Houston Texans were great.

The Yankees were the Yankees. They did things their way. It took a lot of work to get what you wanted and you better have it spelled out in the contract. (Debbie Tyman & Mike Tusiani are great, they just don't have a lot of flexibility.)

Oh, and the Devils were in their own league. Lou Lamoriello was such a micro-manager. He refused to charter on us and was bitter that our name was on his arena & ice, without him getting any of the money, and didn't want to create effective marketing platforms. But he expected us to spend money with him.

During the short lived Yankee/Nets, when he was in charge of everything, he told me that we'd either sponsor all three teams (Yankees, Nets & Devils) or none of them.

I told him if that was his opening, the meeting was over. I explained that airplanes would still take off and land even if we didn't sponsor the Yankees, and we walked out on them.

Our sales guys from the Yankees & Nets came running after us. Only when we got what we wanted, did we do a small deal with the Devils.