Number 1: "Radio Station"
"If this doesn’t get your toe tapping, check your pulse, you may be dead," warns the DJ in Pepsi’s "Radio Station" directed by Joe Pytka of PYTKA, Venice, Calif., via BBDO New York.
A lonely radio station sits on the desert at twilight. Little would the viewer guess that the music broadcast from this shack will bring the whole country together, coast to coast, tapping to the rhythm of "The Joy of Cola." Corny? Perhaps. Catchy? Definitely. "The Joy of Cola" is a welcome flashback to the days when jingles ruled advertising.
Mary Wood and Clifford Lane of Crushing Underground, New York, were the composers/ arrangers and also the vocalists for the jingle. BBDO gave Wood and Lane almost total freedom when coming up with this piece of music. "What’s great about this is that the team that we worked with and the people at BBDO are totally open-minded," says Lane. "We have a relationship there that’s beautiful-no rules." Adds Wood, "It’s so good when they let you do what you do. You know what Pepsi is and you know the demographic-now you just have to write a great song. They know us well enough to trust us."
Lane explains, "Mary and I made a conscious decision not to be irreverent this time. If they want us to sell soda [then] let’s sell soda, and not an image. And the agency was totally ready for that. The fact that we didn’t have fear of jingles meant that they didn’t have fear of jingles." Then he laughs. "We weren’t trying to be cool. It’s not cool, and that’s so cool." Wood concurs, "Being a jingle just means that it’s very melodic; it doesn’t have to be edgy."
How many revisions did they go through to get the sound just right? "Believe it or not, we got it right the first time with the demo," says Wood. "It had a certain magic to it the first time around." When asked how they knew it was catchy enough, Wood replies, "You just know when something is good. Plus, it’s in your head all the time."
The sound is synchronized with the music, keeping time with the beat, as we are shown scenes of people around the country going about their business as even the inanimate objects around them join in the "toe-tapping" rhythm. Yellow cabs in New York jiggle, golf balls bounce, and bowling pins rattle as people look on in bewilderment.
Marshall Grupp of Marshall Grupp Sound Design, New York, did the sound design on the spot. He came into the project after the track was already done, so the sound was edited to the music. "The edit kept changing so I had to keep changing the placement of the steps and bowling pins bouncing and so forth," says Grupp, "The hardest one to do was the bowling pins. I used three or four sounds to get that. Stamping feet were two sounds. It’s always more than one sound because you have to make it bigger than what it is to make it more interesting and also to give it its own life. I did a lot of Foleys. On most of the sounds there’s a Foley element to them, besides pulling some sounds from my own library."
Lane concludes: "This assignment was easier than most. The agency just told us: ‘The Joy of Cola,’ and that gave us so much to go on: Joy. So we tried to come up with something very joyous."
