Can't Touch This: Coke Told To Keep Hands Off Hammer Ads
TOKYO - Round One of the Great Japanese Cola Advertising War is over, and Coca-Cola has dipped into its arsenal of Japanese business ways to do something few others have managed: put a clamp on M.C. Hammer's rap banter.
For a while, PepsiCo Inc. thought it had managed to ride the rapper's popularity into a greater share in the Japanese cola market, and to make history in a land where advertisers usually refrain from knocking competitors.
Then Coke fired back.
PepsiCo Japan filed a complaint with Japan's Fair Trade Commission, saying Coca-Cola Co. pressured Tokyo's five major TV stations to drop a Pepsi ad portraying Coke in an unflattering light.
Pepsi said Coke muscled a number of stations into taking the ad off the air because the ad - which features rap star Hammer - had proved a spectacular success. Coke retorted that the ad was both "false and disparaging."
How the commission will rule on Pepsi's complaint against Coca-Cola is far from clear, but at stake in the controversy may be Japan's taboo against comparative ads.
According to conventional wisdom, comparative ads don't work here because the polite Japanese recoil from the explicit confrontation to which U.S. viewers have become accustomed in ads for cars, batteries and soft drinks.
The Pepsi spot shows Hammer sipping a Coke during a concert, then dismaying his hip audience by crooning a sentimental ballad. After he is handed a Pepsi, Hammer reverts to rap that brings the crowd back to life.
Pepsi had little to lose by launching the unorthodox campaign. Coke controls about 90 percent of the cola market in Japan.