Pepsi Spot Puts Fizz in Young Career

Pepsi-Cola’s latest weapon in the bruising soft-drink wars is a cute 6-year-old girl from New Jersey on her way to a film career.

Hallie Eisenberg, star of Pepsi’s “joy of cola” campaign, is in San Francisco this week, where she’s been cast in the Walt Disney Co. production, “Bicentennial Man,” expected to be in theaters in December.

Pepsi plucked Hallie from 100 children vying to lip-sync for entertainers Aretha Franklin, Isaac Hayes and Marlon Brando in its commercials.

The bubbly first-grader “just blew the other little girls away,” said Michael Patti, executive creative director at BBDO in New York, Pepsi’s agency. “You can hand her a script, and she will have it memorized in two minutes. She can change her performance a little bit or a lot, depending on direction.”

Pepsi took a chance in using a child as a brand icon, observers say. For one thing, children grow up. “She may not be as cute in 14 months as she is now,” said Bob Garfield, a critic with trade publication Advertising Age.

And children are considered most effective in ads directed at other kids, said Sam Craig, professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

But BBDO said Hallie possesses the same mixture of innocence and confidence that made the “Mikey” commercials for Quaker Oats’ Life cereal a success in the 1970s.

“It seems to me that Mikey was another lucky accident where you got a great performance out of a kid that somehow touched the heartstrings of America,” Patti said. In Hallie, “we realized that we had an icon in the making.”

The public seems to agree. Viewers of last month’s Academy Awards telecast chose the “joy of cola” ads as their favorite, according to a survey by SAA Research.

Hallie started acting at age 4, and so far has appeared in four television movies and three films. Her brother Jesse, 15, has appeared in Broadway shows, and her sister Kerry, 19, sings and studies piano.

But it is the Pepsi campaign, backed by PepsiCo’s multimillion-dollar media budget for the brand, that has made Hallie a celebrity. Admiring adults many times Hallie’s age request her autograph, and her parents are in the process of obtaining an unlisted number because they’ve been overwhelmed with calls.

“The extent of recognition is almost stupefying,” said her father, Barry Eisenberg, an executive recruiter.

As for Hallie, “I’m meeting a lot of nice people,” she says. “It’s fun.”

When she’s working, she is tutored three hours a day. Like many girls her age, she likes to roller-skate and is fond of frilly dresses. Her favorite meal is pasta with steamed carrots. And, yes, she likes Pepsi. “It’s sweet, bubbly and fizzy,” she said. “I like fizzy things.”

BBDO is about to shoot another commercial with Hallie but added that Pepsi is planning to broaden the “joy of cola” campaign.

“Whether that will include Hallie remains to be seen when we start working on the next level of the campaign,” Patti said.