Thursday, February 5, 2009

Hooray for bad specs!

Ok, one billboard is a mistake, but two? It seems I have to let the production company off the hook when it comes to Pepsi's Optimism billboards. I saw another recently with that said "HOORAY!" with half or so of the exclamation point cut off.

It seems to have been either a design mistake or a very curious design decision. I can't think of a lot of experienced art directors of designers who believe in zero-margin work. Perhaps there was some deep conceptual idea that the optimism behind the words and the brand are so big that they cannot be contained within the narrow confines of a billboard! Except they could have done that with extensions and it wouldn't have looked like a rookie design error.

Oh well, nitpicking over billboard margins is hardly the worst of Pepsi's brand refresh problems. I hear plenty of folks are offended at the new 20 oz bottle, which is clearly a Gentile.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think I commented when you posted the first billboard, that this is not the first zero-margin billboard I've seen from a national brand. I probably also said that the new Pepsi logo looks like it's generic cola pretending to be Pepsi.

But the Gentile bottle design tops it all! Is this left over from BBDO? Were they trying to ditch the account? Or is the new TBWA/Chiat/Day stuff?

(I found info about the changeover here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/business/media/18adco.html )