TV Ad in 3-D : Cola Rivalry Takes on New Dimension

Wondering what to wear to this year’s Super Bowl party? In an extravagant effort to literally catch the eye of the nation’s largest television audience, Coca-Cola says it plans to hand out 20 million sets of 3-D glasses.

The glasses will let TV viewers see a three-dimensional broadcast of a 13-minute magic show shown during half-time and, of course, a 45-second Diet Coke commercial that could cost Coca-Cola as much as $2 million in all.

The half-time extravaganza and commercial will be aired on Jan. 22, Super Bowl Sunday, and can be seen with or without the glasses. But to see the show in 3-D, viewers will have to pick up glasses that Coke is distributing free of charge at grocery stores nationwide.

Attractive Alternative

“When millions of Americans sit down to watch the biggest game of the year, half-time will feel like an extra quarter of non-stop action,” said Michael A. Beindorff, vice president of advertising at Atlanta-based Coca-Cola.

A lot more than fun and games, however, is behind Coke’s unusual effort.

The bitter struggle with archrival Pepsi--especially for the growing diet soft drink market--is forcing both advertisers to vastly change their advertising strategies. “This year’s Super Bowl action won’t be confined to the stadium,” said Michael K. Lorelli, Pepsi’s executive vice president of sales and marketing. “It’s also going to be a good, old-fashioned clash of the cola titans.”

Traditionally, the two soft drink makers have waited until the Grammy Awards in late February to kick off their annual ad campaigns. The Grammy Awards, after all, generally attract the large numbers of young viewers that both soft drink makers want to attract.

This year, however, with increased attention focused on the fast-growing, $10-billion U.S. diet soft drink market, the Super Bowl may prove to be a far more attractive alternative. For one, it has by far the largest audience of the two events--with an estimated 54 million households tuning in.

But perhaps even more important is the timing of the Super Bowl. It comes just a few weeks after the Christmas holidays. And many viewers are either on post-holiday diets--or at least considering the possibility of shedding some weight.

“More and more men out there are drinking diet soft drinks,” said Gary Hemphill, editor of the Cleveland-based trade magazine Beverage Industry. “And football--especially the Super Bowl--is the logical tie-in.”

Neither Pepsi nor Coke officials will discuss the story lines of the ads they plan to air. Diet Coke officials did, however, indicate that their ad may have some sort of tie-in to either the Super Bowl game or the game’s half-time magic show.

Strike Changed Plans

“Obviously the object is to take people by surprise,” said Spencer Plavoukos, chairman of the New York office of Lintas: Worldwide, the ad agency for Diet Coke. “But I can tell you that the commercial hasn’t even been filmed yet--nor have we decided where to film it.”

The 3-D technology behind the Coke ad is that of a Westlake Village-based company, Nuoptix Associates. The problem with past 3-D commercials is that viewers without the special glasses mostly saw a blurred screen. But viewers without the special Nuoptix 3-D glasses will still see clear images on their TV screens--although not in three dimensions.

Earlier this year, Coke planned to use the same 3-D technology in a commercial to be aired during the final show of the television series, “Moonlighting.” A segment of that show was also to be filmed in 3-D. But a writers strike canceled both projects, and Coke had millions of 3-D glasses on its hands.

Pepsi, meanwhile, has completed filming a handful of new ads for both Pepsi and Diet Pepsi.

One of several new Diet Pepsi ads featuring Michael J. Fox--filmed in Los Angeles--may break during the Super Bowl. And Pepsi is even considering airing a much-ballyhooed commercial that was filmed earlier this month in Moscow but that was originally scheduled to run during the Grammy Awards.

Pepsi officials insist they are not reacting to Coke’s 3-D spectacle. “If we only watched what our competitors were doing,” said Stuart Ross, Pepsi’s manager of public relations, “we’d always be falling behind them.”