Glendale, AZ–The Super Bowl ads in general were pretty fair to men this year, but there was one major exception–Pepsi’s “Magnetic Attraction” commercial. According to the MySpace Super Bowl ads description:
“The Pepsi Stuff promo shows Justin Timberlake being drawn toward a woman and somehow pulled through space, off the ground, by some magnetic force. He crashes and gets beat up by his strange experience being pulled through space and having close and sometimes painful encounters with immovable objects and experiencing near misses with death.”
I understand slapstick humor but this was way over the line–Timberlake is in severe pain in the ad, and gets painfully whacked in the nuts on three separate occasions. All because some pretty girl is sucking him in by drinking her Pepsi (pictured). To watch the ad, click here.
The two people to contact at Pepsi regarding the ad are:
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. A very high profile individual, she was #1 on Fortune”s list of the 50 most powerful women in business in both 2006 and 2007. She can be reached at indra.nooyi@pepsico.com, headquarters phone: 914 253-2000, headquarters fax: 914 253-2070
Pepsi CMO Cie Nicholson. She is the Pepsi executive with the most direct responsibility for the ad. She can be reached at cie.nicholson@pepsi.com, or headquarters phone: 914 253-2000. Her personal fax is 914 249-8361
To email them both, click here.
The ad was designed by BBDO, a prominent advertising agency with a track record of making commercials which denigrate men and fathers. To view some of them, click here.
To contact their corporate offices, see the contact information below:
Andrew Robertson, BBDO CEO, andrew.robertson@bbdo.com, Phone: 212 459-5000, Fax: 212 459-6645
Bill Bruce, BBDO-NY Chief Creative Officer (The BBDO executive with the most direct responsibility for the ad), bill.bruce@bbdo.com, Phone: 212 459-5000, Fax: 212 459-5280
To email them both, click here.
Thanks to advertising guru Richard Smaglick of www.fathersandhusbands.org .
To be fair, while BBDO does have a track record of anti-male commercials, they also produced the fine AT&T ad “Monkey,” which can be seen here.