Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 30, 1993 TAG: 9305280336
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRUCK HOROVITZ LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
So popular are the three Los Angeles women - the "Uh-Huh girls" who co-star with Ray Charles in a Diet Pepsi ad series - that Pepsi is filming an ad at Venice Beach without their co-star from the past 13 commercials. Pepsi estimates that the women have generated more than $20 million in free publicity for the brand.
But the '90s version of the Supremes has not produced increased sales for Diet Pepsi. Despite more than $100 million spent on the campaign to make sure that their faces are everywhere, supermarket sales of Diet Pepsi this year through mid-April were down 3.8 percent compared to last year. By contrast Diet Coke dropped .3 percent during the same period, says Beverage World magazine.
Marketing experts say that hot ad campaigns don't always light up sales. Sometimes the characters in ads are so entertaining that while consumers consider them to be terrific comedians, singers or dancers - they miss the sales pitch altogether.
Most consumers don't even realize the "Uh-Huh" ads are for Diet Pepsi, said Dave Vadehra, president of Video Storyboard Tests, a New York ad research firm. Although the campaign rated No. 2 last year in a survey of 22,000 consumers, nearly three-fourths of the consumers said they thought the ad was for the Pepsi brand - and not Diet Pepsi.
Granted, sales of virtually all diet colas - including arch rival Coke - have been mostly heading south for the past few years. And the so-called New Age soft drinks and bottled juices have been clawing away at the diet soft drink market.
During the 1980s, it wasn't unusual some years for sales of Diet Pepsi to grow at a double-digit pace. But over the past three years of the "Uh-Huh" campaign sales have been disappointing.
"We're not happy with the slowed rate of growth," said Jeff Campbell, senior vice president at Pepsi. "But I can't fault the campaign for the slowdown. It relates to all the new competitors out there."
The biggest mistake that Diet Pepsi has made is to "underutilize" the Uh-Huh Girls, Campbell said. At first, he said, Pepsi executives did not realize that the three women - who all wear wigs and lip-sync their way through the Diet Pepsi song - had so much talent. But the women - Gretchen Palmer, Darleen Dillinger and Meilani Paul - are now seeking a recording contract and hope to eventually record their own Diet Pepsi spot.
They recently toured Japan, and were such a hit there that a flashy picture of them now appears on all labels across Diet Pepsi bottles there. Only one other American performer has had his mug on a Japanese Pepsi bottle before them: Michael Jackson.
Pepsi executives won't disclose what they pay the three women, but their 1993 salary is said to be nearly four times what the company paid them in 1992. And for each public appearance the women make - at grocery stores or corporate meetings - Pepsi pays them an estimated $5,000.
"We're participants in one of the greatest campaigns of the 90s," said Dillinger, in an interview before the commercial shoot at Venice Beach. "Nothing goes on forever," she said, "but as long as they want us around, we'll stick with them."
Pepsi can take some solace in the fact that this is is hardly the first campaign whose tremendous popularity has far exceeded its affect on a company's bottom line.
Several years ago, a wildly popular campaign for Isuzu - featuring the lying "Joe Isuzu" character - clearly struck a chord with consumers. But Isuzu sales were disappointing and the campaign was eventually dropped. And while the Eveready Bunny has emerged as one of the most beloved campaigns of the 90s, one researcher found that 40 percent of the consumers questioned said they thought the campaign was for Duracell.
by CNB