Before Leary, there was Pepsi. In 1963, Alan Pottasch, a newly hired advertising executive at the Pepsi Cola Company, was sitting in his office, pencil in hand, desperately brainstorming ideas for a challenge he might mount against Coca-Cola, the establishment soft drink par excellence, known then as "the brand beyond competition."
Decades of experience had shown that competing with Coca-Cola was a Sisyphean undertaking. Like other giants of the 1950s, Coke had invested millions in advertising meant to cultivate a fierce brand loyalty. Along the way it had succeeded, as few firms do, in transcending mere persuasion and instead convincing people that Coke was not only the better choice but also somehow the only choice. As historian Thomas Frank explains, "Coke built an unrivaled dominance of the once-localized soft-drink marketplace: it offered a single product that was supposed to be consumable by people in every walk of life - rich and poor, old and young, men and women - and in every part of the country." Coke managed to create a phenomenally low "brand e1asticiry" - the economist's term for the willingness of consumers to accept a substitute, a matter proven by the fact that Pepsi was similar, cheaper, yet remained unable to build market share,"
Coke had succeeded by identifying itself with everything wholesome and all-American, drawing on the deep American self-regard and desire to belong - and somehow making it feel that to drink something else might be vaguely treasonous. At Christmas, it even associated itself with Santa Claus, and in fact the company helped cement the modern image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness as a rotund bearded man with a broad belt, clad in Coca-Cola's red and white.
Pepsi, meanwhile, was the perennial underdog. First bottled in 1893, when it was called Brad's Drink. Pepsi was originally sold as a minor-league patent medicine: the "healthy" cola. The name was a play on its claim to treat dyspepsia. or indigestion. As the trailing brand. Pepsi was willing. early on. to cry innovative promotional techniques, like catering to me disenfranchised. Coca-Cola advertised itself as the all-American drink, but by this it meant the white American drink, and so Pepsi in the 1940s briefly experimented with niche marketing by creating an a11-black marketing department. known as the "negro-markets" department. Over the 1950s, Pepsi depended entirely on identifying itself not as healthful. or even better tasting, but the cheaper cola. occupying the market niche that generic colas hold today. Its most successful jingle, the one McLuhan borrowed for Leary's psychedelic venture. had gone like this: "Pepsi-Cola hits the spot; 12 full ounces. that's a lot." Truth in advertising: Pepsi was sold in a 12-ounce bottle for 5 cents. the price of 6.5 ounces of Coke. By 1957. when Portasch joined the company. despite all its efforts Pepsi was being outsold by a factor of nearly six to one, giving a classic demonstration of the power of brand to undermine the concept of choice - but without anyone feeling they had sacrificed any freedoms. They were just choosing Coke. that's all.
Ponasch had begun to persuade his management that selling Pepsi as a cheaper alternative was not, in the long run, a winning strategy. But what else could Pepsi be? Like Leary. Marcuse, and others. Portasch noticed that there was something going on with the young people. who were listening to different types of music and dressing differently than their parents, and - while this was still the early 1960s - giving some signs of rebellion against the consumer culture constructed over the 1950s. But if Leary or Marcuse sought to ride the swirling social movements to challenge the established social order. Pottasch thought he could employ it to sell Pepsi Cola.
"We made a decision," he later recalled. "to Stop talking about the product. and start talking about the user." He thus conceived of marketing Pepsi without reference to its inherent qualities. focusing instead on an image of the people who bought it. or who should be buying it. They were the people of the moment: the young. the rebellious. those who (to borrow a later slogan) "think different." They would be known, in Portasch's new formula, as "the Pepsi Generation."
The new ads were the picture of vitality: beautiful young people casually dressed, hanging out, and having fun. "Come alive!" the text read, "You're in the Pepsi generation!" Others read, "For a generation really on the move." Printed in 1964, they look nothing like the more staid advertisements of just a year earlier. Following up on popularity it had won among African Americans, Pepsi also ran similar ads with African American models, also building what would become the brand's counter-cultural bona fides.
"For us to name and claim a whole generation after our product was a rather courageous thing," Pottasch would later remember, "that we weren't sure would take off" But his intuition would prove correct. "What you drank said something about who you were. We painted an image of our consumer as active, vital, and young at heart."
Pepsi, of course, did not create the desire for liberation in various matters from music to sex to manners and dress. Rather, it had cleverly identified with a fashionable individualism. All individualisms, of course, harbor a strain of narcissism, and Pepsi had implicitly understood that, too. For ultimately what the Pepsi Generation were consuming wasn't so much cola as an image of themselves.
Whether Pepsi's approach was truly original is a good question; advertisers are continually claiming to invent things that, on closer inspection, have long existed. But clearly, this campaign had nothing to do with the traditional hard sell, with the product, and what it might do for you, front and center. Pepsi's advertisements and their imitators were in some sense just an even softer version of the soft sell, which pictured an ideal and associated it with the product. Into this category one might put both the "Arrow Man," a dashing figure who wore Arrow shirrs in the 1920s, and the Marlboro Man, solitary smoker of the Great Plains. But no one who smoked Marlboros wanted or expected to become a wrangler. The Pepsi difference was to suggest that consuming the product somehow made you into what you wanted to be.
Pepsi changed its slogan to "The choice of a new generation" and paid Michael Jackson an unprededented $5 million to dance with children to a song set awkwardly to his "Billie Jean" (lyrics: "You're the Pepsi Generation/ guzzle down & taste the thrill of the day/And feel the Pepsi way" (Michael Jackson's agent approached Coca-Cola first, but the market leader was not interested. "They [Coke]saw anything they would do with Michael," recalls the agent, "as a more targeted, ethnic campaign.")
Print advertising has always been less unpopular than television or radio; for it is more under the control of the reader who can avert the eyes. It can also be beautiful. Some of it became much harder to ignore during the 1980s, like a Calvin Klein campaign starring a fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields, or another picturing two men and a woman sleeping in their (Calvin Klein) underwear after a threesome. And on television, viewers (other than parents) might be disposed to zap Shields posting provocatively in her Calvin Klein jeans and intoning. "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." These were a far cry from the old. extremely irritating Anacin advertisements depicting hammers pounding the skull. Whether, in fact, they prevented zapping, however, is hard to know for sure. Fortunately for the advertising industry, it remained impossible to accurately measure whether people were watching commercials or not, saving the enterprise from a true and full accounting.
It was also during this era that the Super Bowl became a showcase for advertising's greatest talents, seeming to prove the point that there were, indeed, commercials that people truly wanted to see.
Tim Wu "Attention Merchants" (2016)
