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Check Out Line: PepsiCo offers up to $5 million for amateur Super Bowl ads
Check out how you can earn $1 million by wearing an electric dog collar.
Okay, not exactly. That was the punch line of a successful amateur ad this year created for PepsiCo’s Super Bowl commercial contest, which the food and beverage company is running again for the 2011 Super Bowl with a prize pool of up to $5 million.
Makers of the best ads for zero-calorie Pepsi Max soda and Doritos chips can win $1 million for an ad that scores No. 1 on a USA Today ad poll, $600,000 for No. 2 and $400,000 for the third spot. A sweep of all three spots earns a $1 million bonus for each winner.
Pepsi ran four ads during the 2010 Super Bowl. A 30-second spot during the National Football League championship game tends to run about $3 million. That electric-collar ad — in which a man winds up with the collar around his neck while the dog makes off with his bag of Doritos — was ranked one of the best of the Super Bowl in many post-game surveys.
You could put up with getting shocked a few times for that, right?
Also in the basket:
Gatorade demand dented by U.S. housing slump
The U.S. housing slump’s impact is well chronicled, but PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi said it also has hurt sales of the company’s Gatorade sports drink.
Nooyi — on a conference call with analysts after the maker of Pepsi-Cola and other sodas and Tropicana juices reported a better-than-expected quarterly profit – said she has met with convenience store CEOs who told her the weak U.S. housing market has resulted in fewer construction workers stopping by for sports drinks and other snacks on their way to the job.
School lunch vs. junk food
School lunch ladies around the United States are fighting to feed healthier food to the nation’s increasingly overweight student body, but their biggest obstacle is competing with fast-food chains like McDonald’s and junk food like Doritos.
In Los Angeles, the country’s second-biggest school district is serving up increasingly nutritious and lower-calorie food (the photo at right shows two Castelar Elementary students’ lunch choices).
A peak into Kimberly-Clark advertising you won’t see
Tony Palmer has been rallying Kimberly-Clark to try out new campaigns since he became its first chief marketing officer in late 2006. He even put together a commercial that he shows to staff, featuring the company’s Cottonelle brand. While we cannot show it here, we did see it at the Promotion Marketing Association’s annual integrated marketing conference this week. Let’s just say a guy swings from a fire hose and then lands uncomfortably on his bottom. The tag line: “If you’re not nice to your ass, you’re an ass.”
No, consumers will not see that commercial. Palmer just uses it to get marketers to take more risks. Huggies is now a little edgier with its advertisements, including a “geyser” of urine splashing around when a father removes his son’s diaper.
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