I'm a Pepper, you're a Pepper out $5 Mil

Maybe they won't see the light of day, but certainly they'll bask for a while in that eerie middle-of-the-night glow of ad geeks viewing these online:

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Mash-up TV spots killed by Dr Pepper:
Music-heavy commercials cost $5 million to produce

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- Cadbury Schweppes spent $5 million producing a Dr Pepper TV campaign that now won't see the light of day.

The marketer has quietly canned an elaborate "mash-up" campaign from famed director Kinka Usher that mixes music from Kiss, Will Smith, EMP and Cyndi Lauper, and ordered up new creative to be produced before the crucial Memorial Day kickoff to soft-drink season. The company attributed the switch to a new strategy.

'Different strategies'

"From last year into this year we had some different strategies that changed," a spokesman said. Now, Y&R, San Francisco, is moving forward on a new campaign concept.

The shelved spots were from the WPP Group agency's New York office, which hired music licensing firm Thwak, New York, to mix tunes together to accompany morphing visuals. The effort's aim was to play up the notion that Dr Pepper has 23 flavors that make up its unique taste and used the tagline "There's more to it." One executive close to the marketer said Cadbury had spent up to $5 million in production costs for the effort, much of it in securing rights for the music. Thwak, Usher Films and Y&R all referred calls to Cadbury.

Full article at AdAge.com (register free to view): See the mash-up TV spots killed by Dr Pepper