Starting Thursday, the soda giant will launch a massive video blitz, set in ancient Roman times, that touts not only some of its flagship beverages, but Paramount’s upcoming “Gladiator II”; the new NFL season; and even Megan Thee Stallion, who stars in the spot along with football greats Josh Allen, Derrick Henry, Justin Jefferson and Travis Kelce. The campaign can be seen across various Paramount properties — including CBS Sports’ NFL broadcasts, Comedy Central and VH-1, along with social media feeds associated with the TV networks. Megan Thee Stallion will turn up at MTV’s 2024 Video Music Awards in full gladiator regalia before the airing of two-minute-plus version of the commercial, and Pepsi’s nod to the movie will be woven into the October 9 episode of MTV’s “The Challenge,” to remind viewers of the overall pitch.
“Megan Thee Stallion is going to get people to pay attention. Travis Kelce and Josh Allen are going to get people to pay attention,” says John Halley, Paramount’s president of advertising, during an interview. “It’s a first-class branding moment for Pepsi and one that is going to last.” The campaign will last until the new movie debuts in late November.
The hard-to-ignore commercial salvo serves to put a spotlight back on some of TV’s best-known ways of serving advertisers — qualities that are being forgotten in the streaming era.
Madison Avenue has long invested millions of dollars in TV properties to put memorable commercials in front of the biggest audiences in media. Such stuff was easier to achieve before the advent of Netflix, Hulu and Max, which let consumers watch their favorite pieces of content at times of their own choosing, a behavior that results in smaller, disparate crowds for each stream of a sitcom, drama or movie. As a result, more advertisers have focused on harnessing digital data to find more discrete groups of consumers, like first -time car buyers or expectant mothers.
And yet, it’s hard to resist the lure of the teeming crowd.
Getting an ad in front of a sizable audience takes more work, which Paramount has done, says Halley. “This crosses every single end point that Paramount controls,”
In a different era, a big advertiser could simply run a few TV commercials and be assured of reaching the numbers necessary to make cash registers ring. Now, an advertising concept needs to be spread across multiple viewing opportunities, all with an eye toward capturing consumer interest in dozens of different interactions with series, movies and specials.
Other sizable marketers have taken bigger swings in efforts to entice the masses. Frito-Lay, a Pepsi corporate sibling, in February snatched up one third of all of the national advertising inventory on a single day on ABC so it could run — and run again — eight different commercials for Lay’s potato chips that told a story tied to the 1993 comedy “Groundhog Day.” During NBCUniversal’s run of this year’s Paris Olympics, the large media agency GroupM arranged to buy an entire commercial break — not a typical practice — and fill it only with commercials from its own clients, such as Target, Coca-Cola and Google.
Pepsi’s visit to Rome has been about a year in the making. According to Halley, the beverage titan first approached Paramount about a big idea tied to “Gladiator II” about about this time last year. The media company worked with Ridley Scott Associates to devise and produce the new commercial, which will be edited and cut up in different ways for various appearances across traditional, social and digital media.
Pepsi has had a decades-long relationship with Paramount and its predecessor company Viacom, a dynamic that helped the idea take root. Pepsi has sponsored the MTV Video Music Awards for most of its four decades on air and gotten involved in everything from efforts to send fans of the MTV series “Laguna Beach” text alerts about plot developments to enticing viewers of VH1, Comedy Central and other cable networks to share photos to win prizes.
In addition to Pepsi’s drinks, there has also been a cascade of ad dollars to the media company. PepsiCo spent more than $181 million advertising through digital, print, radio and TV outlets during 2023, according to MediaRadar, a tracker of ad spending. Network and cable TV represented 85% of the ad spend last year, and 15% of the overall ad spend when to Paramount outlets, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Paramount Network, and VH1, according to MediaRadar.
The beverage company has visited the Roman Empire in the past. In 2003, Pepsi stirred conversation by creating an eye-popping commercial for international markets that featured Beyonce, Britney Spears and Pink as Roman gladiators battling in the Coliseum to the sounds of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Enrique Iglesias appeared as a cruel Emperor whose plans were thwarted by the musical warriors.
Paramount’s Halley says the Pepsi promotional gambit is the first of what he calls “Summit” packages aimed at getting advertisers the “broadest reach across Paramount’s entire asset base – broadcast, sports, cable, all of our digital endpoints – with all of that tied to” familiar content. The company has already approached a handful of advertisers with ideas, he says, noting that “you will see more of this,” and suggesting that other concepts might involve Paramount movies or even scripted episodic TV series.
Such concepts “take a lot of time to pull off,” he notes, “but there’s a fairly short list of clients who can do things this ambitiously.” Paramount is no doubt looking for advertisers that have time to do more than sweat the small stuff.
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