Perennial Super Bowl advertising powerhouse AB InBev won’t run ads for its flagship Budweiser brew during Super Bowl LV, opting to reallocate its investment to ongoing COVID-19 awareness.
The popular Clydesdales aren’t the only ad icons benched.
Coke and Pepsi, two marketing giants that usually provide highlights as good as the actual game, also won’t run thematic ads for their top cola brands on the CBS broadcast, though Pepsi remains the long-term sponsor of the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show.
But it wasn’t always that way. As we reach the 30th anniversary of one of the closest, most newsworthy and intriguing Super Bowls — also played in Tampa Bay — it’s interesting to revisit that game and some of its marketing battles off the field.
Back in 1991, two teams representing New York state traveled to Florida to decide the football championship. Patriot missiles were stationed outside Tampa Stadium, for the US had just entered the Gulf War. America had its problems, but it was a more unified land; Whitney Houston performed perhaps the most stirring national anthem we’d ever heard to bring a nation together.
The Super Bowl pregame show was evolving into the massively hyped event it is today. The first Iraq War was just beginning; the so-called Cola Wars had been raging for years. Always the burr in Coke’s side, Pepsi decided to engage in a bit of guerrilla marketing.
At the time, end zone dance celebrations were becoming the new big thing. There was Icky Woods doing the Icky Shuffle, Clarence Verdin with the “Verdance,” and of course, high-stepping Deion “Prime Time” Sanders, a veritable Michael Jackson on Astroturf.
Pepsi’s agency, MillSport, brought a fun idea to a meeting with Pepsi marketing and PR in Somers, NY.
The company had just signed its latest celebrity endorser, MC Hammer, who, that year, was on top of the world with “Can’t Touch This.” You might remember the hot dance moves and groovy genie pants. If not, you had to be there.
MillSport’s idea was for Hammer to appear at the Super Bowl to teach Woods, Verdin and Sanders the latest moves in an “End Zone Dance Off.”
The agency’s head, Bob Basche, a well-connected and inventive sports marketer best known for creating “Breakfast at Wimbledon,” had even arranged for editorial time on the ABC pregame show.
Pepsi loved the idea. They had already planned to break a splashy new Diet Pepsi campaign during the biggest ad platform ever invented. Now they could integrate the brand and a new company endorser into a pregame segment.
Yet they couldn’t have a brand backdrop for the hit – Coke had the official league and stadium soft drink rights. And ABC wouldn’t permit Hammer to wear Pepsi garb. So, the intrepid PR team painted a football with the Diet Pepsi logo and assigned a young PR manager (and my Fordham classmate) Andrew Giangola to make sure it got into the shot.
As the “dance off” talent waited to come back from a commercial break, Giangola gave the painted ball to Hammer to flaunt on air. But an eagle-eyed producer spotted the surreptitious handoff and snatched the ball away.
Pepsi’s PR rep retrieved the verboten, rights-offending pigskin, caught the eye of Deion Sanders and tossed him the ball with a fluttering pass was more Billy Kilmer than Johnny Unitas. As you can see on this low resolution video after the football floats over Hammer’s head, Sanders examines the ball as if it’s an unknown foreign object first introduced to him at this moment, and then flashes it for the camera.
“The more entertaining footage would have been a kid in an ill-fitting blazer behind the cameraman madly gesticulating for Deion to please stick the branded football into the shot so he could keep his job,” the former Pepsi PR rep said. “Props to Prime Time for halfheartedly showing it at the end of the live hit.
“As product integrations go, not exactly E. T. eating Reese’s Pieces. Or the Pepsi vending machine in Tom Hanks’ apartment in Big. We would do a lot better post-game.”
As older Giants fans will remember and Bills fans would like to forget, Giants quarterback Phil Simms was out of the game with a foot injury. Jeff Hostetler, a former third round pick, was over center.
The day before the game, Rick Rock, Pepsi’s head of Entertainment Marketing, had cut an ingenious deal with Hostetler’s agent. If the Giants won, and his client put on a Diet Pepsi hat for the postgame festivities, Pepsi would pay him $10,000.
Saturday night, hat in hand, Giangola meekly knocked on a hotel room door, which was opened by a tall, affable guy in a T-shirt and Giants sweats who could have been just about any giddy twenty-something in town for the game. Hostetler took the cap and with a wink confidently said he’d be wearing it Sunday night.
And he did. The underdog Giants would upset the heavily favored Bills, 20-19, courtesy of an infamous “wide right” field goal miss. Hostetler went 20-32 with 222 yards and a TD, a performance ranked by ESPN as the 30th best in Super Bowl history.
He also starred in what could rank as the No. 1 investment in the history of product placements in sports.
The game would be memorable for everyone at Pepsi.
In light of the war, Coke had gotten cold feet and decided to pull a humorous ad they’d planned. Pepsi had new spots from BBDO directed by ad legend Joe Pytka with Ray Charles singing a catching new jingle. They went in guns blazing.
“The war had everyone on edge. We felt America deserved to be entertained for a few hours,” explained Giangola, who now oversees communications for a league blatantly mashing sports and entertainment – Professional Bull Riders (PBR).
(Even so, ABC preempted the traditional halftime entertainment — New Kids on the Block —for a Peter Jennings “War in the Gulf” report.)
Pepsi made the right decision. Ray Charles’ “incontestably tasteful and eminently wonderful” You Got The Right One Baby, Uh-huh! ad campaign took three of the four top spots in the once closely watched and nationally publicized USA TODAY AdMeter.
The Super Bowl had launched yet another award-winning campaign, which would spawn a fun diversion in the Diet Pepsi Uh-Huh! Girls, who had a habit of showing up in sleek black cat suits and bobbed wigs at Coke pours like The Final Four –handing out their favorite beverage to the delight of fans and the great chagrin of the official soft drink sponsor.
To the extent that the current pandemic has now crushed global hospitality, it was alive, well, and raging in Tampa 30 years ago. Pepsi’s young PR manager slept the entire Monday trip back to New York City.
“A flight attendant nudged me awake in an emptying plane at the gate,” Giangola remembered. “I scrambled out and left the painted-up football in the overhead bin. If anyone has it, that’s the story behind your weird Diet Pepsi football.”
