"It's sweet, it's charming, you'll smile, maybe you'll laugh," Semel said of the commercial, created by Euro RSCG Black Rocket in San Francisco, part of the Euro RSCG Worldwide division of Havas.
Precedent
While many marketers talk about being sensitive to events, sensitivity, like beauty or the movie that deserves the Oscar for Best Picture, is often in the eye of the beholder. The case study many advertisers and agencies invoked as they pondered their war plans was the 1991 Super Bowl, which was played after Operation Desert Storm started.
The Pepsi-Cola Co division of PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Co both had planned to run humorous commercials during the game as well as stage phone-in promotions. But after the war began, Pepsi-Cola shelved its promotion and proceeded with its funny spots, while Coca-Cola did the opposite.
Coca-Cola's replacement commercials, somber text-only spots, were widely derided, while the outcome of its promotion was ignored. Viewers and critics, however, judged Pepsi-Cola's silly spots appropriate for the Super Bowl's upbeat environment, and of course it did not hurt that the war was turning out to be a victory for the US and its allies.
This time around, Pepsi-Cola "is developing plans for what would be appropriate" during the Oscars, "dependent obviously on what's going on" Sunday, said Bart Casabona, a spokesman in Purchase, NY
The company is scheduled to run spots for Aquafina bottled water and commercials for the flagship Pepsi-Cola brand with the singers Beyonce Knowles and Shakira. All the spots are from Omnicom agencies: Aquafina, by Element 79 Partners in Chicago; Knowles, by Spike DDB in New York; and Shakira, by the New York office of BBDO Worldwide.
Speaking from the other side of the America Online fence, as a carrier of advertising rather than as a buyer of advertising, Sarfaty said the company has decided that for the first 48 hours after the outbreak of war, "there will be no advertising on the AOL welcome screen, in AOL news and in select other locations."
Joe Mandese, editor of Media Markets Daily in New York, a newsletter published by Primedia, estimated that war coverage would displace $114.1 million worth of television commercials each day from national broadcast and cable networks as well as local broadcast stations.
Mandese said he expected commercial-free coverage to run six days, at a cost of $684.6 million, followed by perhaps as much as six weeks' worth of programs with lighter commercial loads than usual, displacing $2.4 billion worth of spots.
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