| Usually, the end of summer heralds the end of the season for the soft drink companies. Not so for Pepsi Co. The company has sprung back with new television commercials for its flagship brand Pepsi as well as for Mirinda orange. | |||||||||
| Incidentally, the Pepsi commercial was first launched online on pepsizone.yahoo.co.in as a three-part teaser webisode featuring its famous brand ambassador Shah Rukh Khan. | |||||||||
| The TVC retains the Oye Bubbly jingle and the tagline Yeh pyas hai badi. But SRK appears in a new avtaar "" he's a snake charmer playing the been for two damsels. However, a stack of Pepsi bottles distracts him. Unable to resist the temptation, he plays the Oye Bubbly tune and the bottles start dancing their way into his bag. | |||||||||
| But when his request for a bakhshish (tip) is brushed off by the girls, the naughty snake charmer, a la the Pied Piper, plays the been again. And the Pepsi bottle stamped on one of the girl's T-shirts starts dancing to the tune as the T-shirt moves up. | |||||||||
| "We came up with this cute and naughty idea which was instantly liked by both Pepsi and SRK," says Surjo Dutt, creative director JWT, the brain behind the commercial. | |||||||||
| "The ad doesn't look obscene because we kept the sensibilities of the viewers in mind and cut the frame just when the T-shirt starts rising," he adds. | |||||||||
| Directed by Ram Madhwani with music inputs from Ehsan and Loy, the TVC was shot in July and wrapped up by August end. It finally went on air on September 16 after a reasonable amount of hype was created by the animated version of the ad which was released on the Net earlier. | |||||||||
| The focus of the script remains what it was in the first Oye Bubbly ad, points out Vipul Prakash, executive vice-president (marketing), "It highlights the craving for Pepsi. In the first Oye Bubbly ad, inanimate objects were shown to have developed lips to gulp down the irresistible drink. This time a Pepsi drinker is personified by SRK as the snake charmer who can't resist the drink." | |||||||||
| Even as the new commercial raises a mixed response among the audience, the mood at Pepsi is upbeat. The pre-launch testing done by the Pepsi team showed the ad to be a big success. | |||||||||
| The Pepsi executives say that if the response to the animated version of the ad on the Net is any indication, it's been received well: "In the first six hours of its launch on the Net we had registered 40,000 hits. Even the repeat rate was high which indicates the ad has been liked by the people," says Prakash, conceding that it's difficult to gauge the success of an ad in just 10 days. | |||||||||
| Incidentally, while King Khan has been the brand ambassador for Pepsi for almost 10 years now apart from an impressive line-up of celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid, the association with the advertising agency, JWT (HTA earlier), is 16 years old. | |||||||||
| According to Pepsi executives, there's been no decline in the ad spends on the brand. Vipul Prakash dismisses any suggestion that the pesticide scare or increased competition from health drinks may have eroded Pepsi sales this year: "If anything, the consumer spends on Pepsi have gone up. This explains our aggressive, high voltage marketing campaign."
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