Diet Pepsi Commercial (1975)

Diet Pepsi is a no-calorie carbonated cola soft drink produced by PepsiCo, introduced in 1964 as a variant of Pepsi with no sugar. First test marketed in 1963 under the name Patio Diet Cola, it was re-branded as Diet Pepsi the following year, becoming the first diet cola to be distributed on a national scale in the United States.

In the 1960s and 1970s its competition consisted of Tab, produced by The Coca-Cola Company, and Diet Rite cola, produced by RC Cola. Diet Coke.

While the U.S. represents the largest single market for Diet Pepsi, it was launched in the UK.

Diet Pepsi was originally test marketed in the United States under the name Patio in 1963. Following a positive reception attributed to the shifting dietary. habits and preferences among the Baby Boomers at the time, the drink was launched nationally as Diet Pepsi the following year. It became the first diet cola to be distributed on a national scale in the US.[1] Distribution was extended to the United Kingdom in 1983,[2] where it is also referred to as Pepsi Diet.[3]

Diet Pepsi competed primarily with The Coca-Cola Company's Tab in the 1960s and 1970s; however, The Coca-Cola Company introduced Diet Coke in 1982 .which has since been the principal competing product to Diet Pepsi. As of 2010, Diet Pepsi represented a 5.3 percent share of all carbonated soft drink sales in the United States, and was ranked as the #7 soft drink brand by volume. In the same year, Diet Coke was recorded as having a 9.9 percent market share.[13]

In December 2012, an AP article reported that Diet Pepsi was changing its sweetener to sucralose ahead of a major rebranding of the soft drink set for January 2013.[14] In 2015, some people on Facebook and Twitter expressed their distaste for the new formula.[15] In response, Pepsi revived its aspartame formulation, as "Diet Pepsi Classic Sweetener Blend" for US markets in September 2016, and it was sold alongside the new formula.[16] PepsiCo later announced plans to revert Diet Pepsi's sweetener from sucralose to aspartame. The new formulation was released marketwide on February 25, 2018.[17]

While it was initially advertised alongside Pepsi, Diet Pepsi began to be promoted independently in the late 1960s. The first television advertisement to feature Diet Pepsi as a standalone product was "Girlwatchers," which placed focus on the cosmetic aspects of the beverage. The musical jingle from this ad generated popular culture appeal to the extent that it was eventually recorded and played on the radio, and later became a Top 40 hit.[36]

Since its inception, musicians, professional athletes, actors and actresses have been featured prominently in the promotion of Diet Pepsi. In 1985, immediately following Super Bowl XIX, the game's respective quarterbacks, Joe Montana (of the San Francisco 49ers) and Dan Marino (of the Miami Dolphins), met in a hallway of what appeared to be a football stadium. Montana, of the winning 49ers, buys Marino a Diet Pepsi, and Marino promises to buy the drink the next time.[37] A Diet Pepsi advertisement in the same year featured Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice-president in the U.S.[38] When the feature film Top Gun was released on home video cassette in 1987, it was promoted via television advertisements – consisting of a Top Gun pilot flying upside down while holding a bottle of Diet Pepsi – which were paid for by Pepsi.[39] In exchange, the film's production studio, Paramount Pictures, included a 60-second Diet Pepsi advertisement on all Top Gun VHS tapes.[40] The resulting cross-promotion was the first of its kind, and after it set record videocassette sales, it was described as "the beginning of a trend" by the Los Angeles Times.[41]

In the late 1980s, Michael J. Fox appeared in commercials for Diet Pepsi, including a memorable commercial that featured him making a robot clone of himself. In that commercial, Fox's girlfriend (played by Lori Loughlin) shows up and accidentally hits Fox with the door, causing him to fall down a chute into the basement. The girlfriend takes the robot clone on a date and leaves the real Fox trapped.

During the early 1990s, R&B singer Ray Charles was featured in a series of Diet Pepsi ads featuring the brand's then-current tagline, "You got the right one, baby!"[42] Supermodel Cindy Crawford became a recurring celebrity endorser for the Diet Pepsi brand at this time as well, beginning with a 1991 television ad in which she purchases a can of the drink from a vending machine on a hot summer day. Cindy Crawford was also brought back in 2002 to introduce a new packaging design for Diet Pepsi, and again in 2005 to promote the revised slogan "Light, crisp, refreshing" with an ad which debuted during Super Bowl XXXIX.[43] In 2005 and 2006, recording artist Gwen Stefani appeared in advertisements related to a campaign in which codes printed underneath Diet Pepsi bottle caps could be redeemed for music downloads on Apple's iTunes Store.[44]