Pepsi Plans No New Ads to Sub for Pulled Madonna TV Spot

Rock queen Madonna has sung her swan song for Pepsi.

Since it pulled the TV commercial that features the song from Madonna’s provocative video “Like a Prayer,” Pepsi has mostly kept mum on its plans. But the chairman of Pepsi’s New York advertising agency said in an interview that Madonna will not be used in any other Pepsi ads this year--and no new celebrities will be hired to replace her.

“When the Madonna ad was pulled,” said Philip B. Dusenberry, chairman and chief executive of the New York office of the ad firm BBDO Worldwide, “the whole idea of using Madonna was pulled.”

Pepsi had planned to film a second Madonna ad later this year, but now that idea has been scrapped, Dusenberry said. What’s more, Pepsi and its ad firm have no plans to replace Madonna. “We’re not going to jump back into the celebrity series,” said Dusenberry. “It’s too late for that.”

‘Why Fuel Confusion?’

Instead, he said, Pepsi will mostly fill the air time it had purchased to run the Madonna ads with previously filmed ads that feature actor Michael J. Fox and singer Robert Palmer. “At least we were not totally left high and dry,” said Dusenberry. In many countries outside the U.S. market, however, Pepsi will continue to run the Madonna commercial.

The two-minute Madonna ad, which ran last month during “The Cosby Show,” was not itself provocative. But it featured the same song that is in her new video, “Like a Prayer,” and some consumers have complained to Pepsi about suggestive scenes in the video. Dusenberry said consumers were confusing the message from the video with the message from the commercial. “So why fuel that confusion? It was better to call it a day,” he said.

Executives at the ad agency and at Pepsi were not shown the video before making the commercial. “The artist was not obliged to show the video to us,” said Dusenberry. “Of course, if we go this route again, we’ll want to probe for these kinds of things.”