BevBlog

This one may just right the economy. Or kill Dr Pepper. Or Both.

Axl Rose finally set a date – November 23 – for the release of his 17-year-in-the-making album Chinese Democracy. His managers said that they’d launch the album with a monumental promotion campaign. Maybe the combination of promotional money hitting record stores and hard rock nostalgia on Wall Street will be enough to return the economy to the tech-boom state that accompanied the release of Guns N’ Roses’ The Spaghetti Incident in 1993, but if that’s not enough, Dr Pepper is there to help.

The Dr Pepper Snapple Group pledged in March to give a free Dr Pepper to everybody in America if Rose released the album anytime this year. The company probably calculated the chances of Chinese Democracy arriving on record store shelves in 2008 to be vanishingly low – like when Taco Bell in 2001 promised free tacos if the Mir space station crashed into a floating 40’ by 40’ target in the South Pacific – but now it looks like the perennially-delayed work will make it to the (17-year older) rock n’ roll public next month.

In response to the shocking announcement, DPSG has done what it can to simultaneously promote its brand, reduce the promise’s cost to the company and hedge against Rose missing his release date. Again.

To receive your free Dr Pepper, visit drpepper.com and register for a free Dr Pepper coupon. The window will only be open for 24 hours, and the coupons will take 4-6 weeks to arrive – which is a long time to wait for a soda, but, then again, we’ve waited 17 years for a rock album.

These days, beverages from teas to juices boast about their antioxidant levels. It’s the new “in” thing – like wearing two different colors of Converse sneakers when America had a Punky Brewster sense of style – but at least one company took it took too far, according to the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus.

The NAD investigated Bossa Nova’s advertising claims that their product contains the more antioxidants than anybody else, and suggested that the juice company not make such claims in the future. The fancy charts they use in their promotions show that acai is the highest antioxidant fruit. The NAD didn’t dispute that claim, but said the juxtaposition with Bossa Nova’s packaging “could be reasonable interpreted to be representative of the antioxidants of the advertised product when that is not the case.”

Bossa Nova said they disagreed – that their claims are supported – but agreed to take the NAD’s findings into account for future advertising and packaging.

Does this boil down to a case of self-regulatory finger-wagging? Or should beverage marketers take head for fear that federal regulators could come next?

In any event, we could have used the NAD’s advice when we all wore mismatched sneakers.