Diet Pepsi - Advertising and Promotion

Advertising and Promotion

While it was initially advertised alongside Pepsi, Diet Pepsi began to be promoted independently in the late 1960s. The first television advertisement to feature Diet Pepsi as a standalone product was “Girlwatchers,” which placed focus on the cosmetic aspects of the beverage. The musical jingle from this ad generated popular culture appeal to the extent that it was eventually recorded and played on the radio, and later became a Top 40 hit.

Since its inception, musicians, professional athletes, actors and actresses have been featured prominently in the promotion of Diet Pepsi. In 1985, immediately following Super Bowl XIX, the game's respective quarterbacks, Joe Montana and Dan Marino, met in a hallway of what appeared to be a football stadium. Montana of the winning team, buys Marino a Diet Pepsi, and Marino promises to buy the drink the next time. A Diet Pepsi advertisement in the same year featured Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice-president in the U.S. When the feature film Top Gun was released on home video cassette in 1987, it was promoted via television advertisements – consisting of a Top Gun pilot flying upside down while holding a can of Diet Pepsi – which were paid for by Pepsi. In exchange, the film’s production studio, Paramount Pictures, included a 60-second Diet Pepsi advertisement on all Top Gun VHS tapes. The resulting cross-promotion was the first of its kind, and after it set record videocassette sales, it was described as “the beginning of a trend” by the Los Angeles Times.

During the early 1990s, R&B singer Ray Charles was featured in a series of Diet Pepsi ads featuring the brand's then-current tagline, "You got the right one, baby!" Supermodel Cindy Crawford became a recurring celebrity endorser for the Diet Pepsi brand at this time as well, beginning with a 1991 television ad in which she purchases a can of the drink from a vending machine on a hot summer day. Cindy Crawford was also brought back in 2002 to introduce a new packaging design for Diet Pepsi, and again in 2005 to promote the revised slogan "Light, crisp, refreshing" with an ad which debuted during Super Bowl XXXIX. In 2005 and 2006, recording artists Gwen Stefani appeared in advertisements related to a campaign in which codes printed underneath Diet Pepsi bottle caps could be redeemed for music downloads on the Apple iTunes music store.