#MAX HEADROOM COKE COMMERCIALS SERIES#

Pepsi, however, isn’t overly impressed about the campaign. “A lot of politicians would like to have that recognition factor,” spokesman Roy Flemming boasted. But a spokesman for the Atlanta company says its $25-million soft drink advertising blitz, in which Max Headroom exhorts “Cokeologists” to “catch the wave,” has made the smarmy pitchman recognizable to 76% of American teen-agers. “After Mean Joe Greene, this is the best commercial that’s come out of Coke.”Ĭoca-Cola has not released sales figures since the commercials started running last April. “The Max Headroom commercials are definitely ahead of Pepsi’s in terms of popularity,” said Dave Vadehra, president of the New York-based survey firm Video Storyboard Tests Inc.

Fox of television’s “Family Ties” and singer Michael Jackson.

#MAX HEADROOM COKE COMMERCIALS SERIES#

In igniting Coca-Cola’s bid to capture the crucial market of 12- to 30-year-olds who make up the heaviest consumers in the $25-billion-a-year soft drink market, Max Headroom threatens to undermine the gains of rival beverage maker Pepsi-Cola, which had aggressively pursed younger consumers in recent years with a series of television ads featuring youthful heroes such as actor Michael J.

The Max Headroom campaign, advertising executives say privately, is the most exciting Coca-Cola campaign since the beverage maker abandoned its popular “Coke Is It” series featuring actor Bill Cosby.Įxperts say the new commercials seem to have awakened Coke from a creative slump that saw the beverage maker experiment with everything from patriotic-themed ads, featuring the Statute of Liberty and images of the nation’s past, to a recent spot that used trick photography to show the contents of a can of Coke defying the laws of gravity by flowing horizontally across the screen.

Those developments are in addition to the book, “Max Headroom’s Guide to Life” and a Karl Lorimar Home Video release and book both called “Max Headroom-20 Minutes Into the Future” that arrived at bookstores this month.Īll in all the talk show host will bring in more than $2 million in revenue in 1986 and could double that total next year, said Terry Connolly, Chrysalis group managing director.Ĭoca-Cola Co., the most visible licensee thus far, secured the beverage rights to Max Headroom last year in a one-year, $400,000 deal to lure the young soft drink buyers it was losing to Pepsi. And Hallmark Cards is discussing marketing a line of greeting cards using Max Headroom, according to a company spokeswoman. Southland Corp.’s 7-Eleven is negotiating to use Max to advertise their new MovieQuik video rentals.

Max headroom coke commercials