It was this time last year when they invaded the Mojave Desert.
They came in helicopters, trucks loaded with electrical equipment, mobile home dressing rooms, pickups, police cars, sports cars and catering trucks-more than 700 of them.
For three days they occupied the same part of the Southern California desert, called the Big Sky Movie Ranch, where TV classics such as ”Gunsmoke” had been before them. But the mission of the team from the New York advertising agency BBDO, a film crew headed by Venice, Calif.-based director Joe Pytka, celebrity spokespeople, and hundreds of extras was not to make a two-hour feature film with Clint Eastwood or a TV movie with Farrah Fawcett.
No, it was all for three 60-second Pepsi commercials.
Pepsi undertook one of its most ambitious productions ever to introduce a new advertising slogan, ”Gotta Have It.” After months of developmental work on the part of BBDO and Pepsi, the weeks of filming, which included location and studio work, began late last summer. The commercials needed to be finished in time for an official unveiling on the Jan. 26 broadcast of the Super Bowl. Neither Pepsi nor its ad agency will talk about how much all this cost, but industry experts agree that each spot came in at at least $1 million.
Pepsi, perhaps more than any other advertiser, has become known for producing extravaganzas that make the average national TV commercial`s cost of $250,000 look like peanuts. Its campaigns with big-name talent such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Robert Palmer, Michael J. Fox and Ray Charles have raised the ante in the cola wars-but also helped raise questions as to whether such huge TV expenditures are worth it.
Rival Coca-Cola isn`t far behind in the big bucks derby. Coke`s notable recent efforts for diet Coke mix film of pop stars, including Paula Abdul or Elton John, with clips of Hollywood legends such as Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart, using the most expensive special effects techniques.
With highly paid ad executives from diet Coke`s ad agency, Lintas:New York, spending weeks in editing suites with equipment that rents for up to $600 an hour, the special effects bills can mount to a half-million dollars for each commercial.
Roger Enrico, who was president of Pepsi USA when the company introduced its Michael Jackson campaign in 1984, boasted in his book ”The Other Guy Blinked” about the $5 million fee paid to secure Jackson`s services for two spots. He said the commercials cost the company ”$20,000 for each second.”
But the soft drink companies aren`t alone in coughing up top dollar to let their ad agencies` art directors realize their wildest visual fantasies. Miller Brewing, Anheuser-Busch, Apple Computer, United Airlines-all have been known to drop a bundle on commercials that depend on gigantic casts, exotic locations and special effects to make their points.
Zap-proof concepts
The motivation is clear. They want to make their commercials zap-proof and memorable. TV viewers sit armed with remote control devices, ready to click their way through an infinite number of cable channels to avoid being subjected to boring commercials. Smart marketers believe that it is positive images of their brands, rather than a hard sell, that will move bottles of cola and beer off store shelves, put a computer in every home or fill the seats of wide-body jets.
But whether it is worth it to spend upwards of $1 million on productions- not counting multimillion-dollar fees to stars-is a question debated around the conference tables of some of the country`s biggest companies.
”There are very few long-running campaigns anymore,” says TV commerical production consultant Hooper White. ”Everyone is looking for that Roman candle that will light up the sky.”
Soft drink company executives seem more willing to take the risk because of the potential reward for a smashing success. About $47 billion worth of soft drinks will be sold at retail this year. That means each percentage point increase in market share is worth $470 million. If extravagant commercials can help make a teenager pick up a Pepsi instead of a Coke, spending a few million bucks in the hopes of capturing their attention seems worth it to the headquarters honchos.
Sometimes it works. ”Nothing has ever done as well in the soft drink business as the early Michael Jackson commercials,” says Jesse Meyers, publisher of Beverage Digest and the country`s leading authority on the cola wars. ”Whatever added costs were incurred were worth their weight in market share points.”
In the 1984 Pepsi series, Jackson transformed his hit single ”Billie Jean” into a Pepsi jingle. And though Pepsi corporate officers had a panic attack when their star`s hair caught on fire during the filming, the publicity generated by the incident stoked millions of dollars worth of free exposure when the commercials actually appeared.
”Michael is beyond being just an entertainer,” Meyers said. ”He is a global personality. The Michael Jackson success was one of the contributing factors to Coke`s reformulation. The impact was spectacular.”
Rip-roaring waste
On the other hand, he says, ”there have been a number of well-known musical commercials from Madonna (Pepsi) to George Michael (Coke) and several others that were a rip-roaring waste of money.”
But Pepsi executives believe that the ”entertainment value of the spots” has always been as important as the sales message, says Ted Sann, vice chairman and executive creative director at BBDO. ”To create accurate portraits that capture the spirit of the Pepsi Generation requires a certain scale.”
Here`s what achieving that scale meant for the ”Gotta Have It”
campaign:
The first commercial opened with an elderly farmer crashing his pickup truck into a Pepsi billboard bearing the old ”Choice of a New Generation”
slogan, symbolically demolishing that eight-year campaign. Then the spot unfolded a `90s film version of Woodstock. People of all ages streamed into a field, and a band was able to build a stage with lights and giant speakers in the middle of nowhere. Once they started to play a specially composed song, Leeza Gibbons from ”Entertainment Tonight” appeared on the scene to give the full report.
Although the throng appears to be at least 100,000 people, it`s really only about 500, Sann explained. ”We shoot a core group,” he said, and through digital imaging make the 500 look like a gigantic crowd.
A huge sound stage, which contained separate sets, was used for the filming of scenes with Yogi Berra, Regis Philbin, Dr. Joyce Brothers and George Plimpton. One set contained a re-creation of the ”Entertainment Tonight” anchor desk, with anchor John Tesh playing himself.
Park from a paint box
For a scene that looked like a Pepsi concert in Central Park with fireworks exploding behind the Manhattan skyline, an empty Central Park was filmed and the people were added through ”movie magic.” The fireworks were the product of a machine called a paint box, where an illustrator paints by computer on film.
”It`s an incredible advance for us,” Sann said. ”It would be impossible to stage something like that within any reasonable budget. Plus, it wouldn`t work, because something you couldn`t control would go wrong.”
After four weeks of shooting and another month of editing, BBDO was ready to show its finished work to Pepsi. The campaign`s debut on the Super Bowl-with five minutes of commercial time purchased at an approximate cost of $8 million-also got a major public relations push with videos offered to TV news outlets and, of course, a blurb on ”Entertainment Tonight.”
”As good as soft drink commercials can be, from Coke`s old `Mean Joe Greene` and `Mountaintop` to Pepsi`s Michael Jackson-some of the ad industry`s best-there is no guarantee that drop-dead advertising will make an uptick in sales,” Meyers says. Distribution, packaging and pricing all are major factors in what moves cases of cola, he said. ”Advertising is only the stitching between pieces of fabric.”
Mixed results
So how is Pepsi doing now that consumers have been bombarded with the message that they ”Gotta Have It”?
Sales are down, but so are sales of Coke Classic. According to the latest figures available from Beverage Digest, which measure sales in supermarkets for the five months ending in May, Pepsi has dropped from a 16 percent share of the soft drink market in 1991 to 15.6 percent this year. Coke Classic, meanwhile, has declined from 15.2 percent to 14.7 percent.
”We`ve always viewed advertising as one element in a very intricate mix of marketing elements,” said a Pepsi spokesman. Even the weather plays a part in sales, he said. And ”new age, better-for-you products are impacting sales, especially of diet colas,” he said. ”It`s very difficult to assess the effect of advertising on immediate sales.”
Pepsi does, however, measure the attitudes of TV viewers toward its advertising. In a post-Super Bowl study, 85 percent of teenagers surveyed who watched the game could recall the campaign, the company spokesman said. And of those who remembered it, they liked it by ”a 10-1 margin.”
Pepsi also cites its showing in VideoStoryboard Reports, a research newsletter that monitors how consumers respond to TV commercials. Four times a year, the New York firm asks consumers what commercials they find to be the most ”outstanding” of those seen lately. For the first quarter of 1992, right after the introduction of ”Gotta Have It,” Pepsi advertising was at the top of the list, the company spokesman pointed out.
True, says Dave Vadehra, who runs VideoStoryboards, publisher of the newsletter,. Sort of. ”For the first three quarters of last year they were No. 1 and for the first quarter of this year too. Last year was on the strength of the Ray Charles commercials for diet Pepsi. And for the first quarter this year it was Ray Charles and Cindy Crawford`s commercial.
”We didn`t get very many mentions of `Gotta Have It` at all. I don`t think that it really stands up to their standards. Diet Pepsi is taking all the thunder,” he said.
”All of the money spent behind the scenes doesn`t make it good advertising,” Vadehra said. He cited two other campaigns that consumers rate highly in his survey-Du Pont Stainmaster carpets (also done by BBDO) and Little Caesars Pizza from New York`s Cliff Freeman and Partners-to illustrate his point. ”Although they are very well produced,” he said, they`re not extravaganzas like the cola companies` ads. ”But they have a concept. Unless you have a really decent concept, production values don`t matter.”
The top brass at Pepsi must agree. For its international campaign that just started appearing in 165 countries-again touted by the company as ”one of the most elaborate commercials in advertising history”-they`ve gone back to a concept that worked in the past: Michael Jackson as a symbol of the
”choice of a new generation.”
COST OF A BIG-BUDGET AD
– Director, crew and production house: $100,000 per shooting day.
– Celebrity talent (not already under contract): $50,000 to $200,000 per celeb per spot.
– Special effects: $250,000.
– Music: $10,000 to $40,000.
– Extras: $50,000 per day.
Catering: $15,000 to $30,000 per day for shooting days with hundreds of extras.
