All I Wanted Was A PEPSI...

Vito brings the taste of a new generation to a violent protest. Can he bridge the divide and save our great nation!? http://twitter.com/vitogesualdi | https://www.patreon.com/gesualdi | http://twitch.tv/vitozone

Vito says: *DISCLAIMER* I am not affiliated with the alt-right / antifa / whatever. This video is not an endorsement of anyone or anything (except Pepsi)(though seriously fuck Pepsi for that dumbass ad)

thanks Evan!

"All I Wanted Was a Pepsi" The Decline of ‘Big Soda’

from The New York Times:



The drop in soda consumption represents the single largest change in the American diet in the last decade.
By MARGOT SANGER-KATZ

Five years ago, Mayor Michael A. Nutter proposed a tax on soda in Philadelphia, and the industry rose up to beat it back.

Soda lobbyists made campaign contributions to local politicians and staged rallies, with help from allies like the Teamsters union and local bottling companies. To burnish its image, the industry donated $10 million to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

It worked: The soda tax proposal never got out of a City Council committee.

It’s a familiar story. Soda taxes have also flopped in New York State and San Francisco. So far, only superliberal Berkeley, Calif., has succeeded in adopting such a measure over industry objections.

The obvious lesson from Philadelphia is that the soda industry is winning the policy battles over the future of its product. But the bigger picture is that soda companies are losing the war.

Even as anti-obesity campaigners like Mr. Nutter have failed to pass taxes, they have accomplished something larger. In the course of the fight, they have reminded people that soda is not a very healthy product. They have echoed similar messages coming from public health researchers and others — and fundamentally changed the way Americans think about soda.

Over the last 20 years, sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted by more than 25 percent. Soda consumption, which rocketed from the 1960s through 1990s, is now experiencing a serious and sustained decline.

Sales are stagnating as a growing number of Americans say they are actively trying to avoid the drinks that have been a mainstay of American culture. Sales of bottled water have shot up, and bottled water is now on track to overtake soda as the largest beverage category in two years, according to at least one industry projection.

The drop in soda consumption represents the single largest change in the American diet in the last decade and is responsible for a substantial reduction in the number of daily calories consumed by the average American child. From 2004 to 2012, children consumed 79 fewer sugar-sweetened beverage calories a day, according to a large government survey, representing a 4 percent cut in calories over all. As total calorie intake has declined, obesity rates among school-age children appear to have leveled off.

The change is happening faster in Philadelphia than in the country as a whole. Daily soda consumption among teenagers, a group closely tracked by federal researchers, dropped sharply — by 24 percent — from 2007 to 2013, compared with about 20 percent for the country. Last month, the city Department of Public Health reported a sustained decline in childhood obesity over the last seven years.

Those reductions are not accidents. The soda tax didn’t pass. But the debate about it, along with a series of related city policies, helped discourage people from drinking soda.

The Philadelphia school district forbids the sale of sugary beverages in schools and limits their availability in public vending machines. The city provides financial incentives for corner stores to highlight healthy foods. And it sends educators into public school classrooms to teach children about nutrition.

Philadelphia, which also has one of the country’s strictest menu-labeling laws, for two years ran radio and television ads encouraging parents to think twice about serving sugary drinks to their children.

“It’s a fight every day, and you just have to stick with it,” said Mayor Nutter, who will leave office in January. “You can’t give up, because it’s just really important.”

But while Philadelphia’s enthusiastic attention has led to outsize results, soda consumption is declining even in cities and towns that have not made big local investments in obesity prevention and public health. The public health community has coalesced around an anti-soda message, and health officials and industry experts agree that public attitudes about soda and consumer tastes are shifting in ways that may be permanent.

The beverage industry continues to fight these shifts — and especially to fight taxes on its products. But it is also aware that after decades of selling a handful of popular, iconic products, changing public attitudes are leading to a profound change in the nature of the business.
The New Tobacco

This summer, executives from the beverage industry gathered at the Harvard Club in New York City. The annual event, hosted by the trade magazine Beverage Digest, featured speakers from the three largest soda makers — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group — along with smaller upstarts, like SodaStream, the home seltzer maker company, and Talking Rain, which makes no-calorie carbonated fruit drinks called Sparkling Ice.

Along the wood-paneled walls, croissants, fruit and silver urns of coffee were laid out. But the hot drinks were largely ignored. The industry’s rapidly expanding bounty was displayed in the center of the room. In an array of ice buckets were Snapple Sorta Sweet, Squirt, Tropicana Farmstand juices, Lipton Sparkling Iced Tea. In a back corner, attendees could make their own lime-basil and coriander apple blossom sodas with a SodaStream machine.

Such events give companies a chance to show their stuff and brag about their successes, but there was nothing bubbly about the atmosphere. This is an industry grasping to master the shifting market.

As John Sicher, Beverage Digest’s publisher, put it in his blunt opening remarks: “It’s been a really challenging decade. It would have been a lot rougher if not for bottled water.”

As sales of the companies’ mainstay products have declined in the United States, the companies have scrambled to offer new products better suited to consumer tastes. Iced teas, sports drinks and flavored waters are smaller but fast-growing segments of the beverage industry. Coca-Cola, for example, has nearly doubled the number of individual products it offers, to 700 this year from 400 in 2004. And companies are increasingly experimenting with smaller packages for sodas, for which customers will pay a higher price per ounce. At the Harvard Club, there was a 7.5-ounce Pepsi minican, which promised “real sugar” instead of high-fructose corn syrup, and a diminutive eight-ounce bottle of Sprite.

“There’s consumers out there that don’t want to consume too much,” said Regan Ebert, the senior vice president for marketing at Dr Pepper Snapple Group, in her presentation on how the company markets its products to Hispanic audiences. The small cans, she said, “do a good job of solving that need for consumers.”


READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/upshot/soda-industry-struggles-as-consumer-tastes-change.html?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email&referer&_r=0

All i wanted was a Pepsi . . .

So i went out tonight to some gathering in a space where i am supposed to sit for an interview for 4 or 5 minutes of air-time (I should say cable or satellite time) tomorrow for Fuel TV. I rarely if ever go out at night anymore but i thought it would be a good idea to scope out the situation for the interview the next day and meet the folks i was going to have to deal with ahead of time. Fact is i knew I'd be able to get a glass of Pepsi with ice at the party, so i went out for 10 minutes.

When i was in my 20's i was practically addicted to Pepsi, then once i became vegan and more conscious of the planet, my health, and the corporate control over our bodies i eventually cut out Pepsi, for many years i'd go without any, more recently i started having them maybe a few times a year at most. Tonight i just had the craving after some crazy BBQ seitan my wife cooked for us.

On the subject of Pepsi, when i was managing Suicidal Tendencies back in 1983 as we were working on putting together that debut album (which i produced), I asked Mike after we did the demo with Spot, to change the lyric to Pepsi instead of Coke (yup, originally it was Coke), i admit i was being selfish and silly with my brand loyalty at the time, but i also convinced Mike that this way no one will mistake it for the drug cocaine, and why not go with the underdog and the whole Pepsi generation angle anyway... Well that seemed to work out pretty well for everyone involved i guess.



Here's the ST song and the video. I have a small cameo at around the 35 second mark, i'm on the left talking to the girl as Tom Araya - from Slayer- pushes Mike. (The Girl was Tom's girlfriend actually). Other notable cameos from hot skaters of that era, "Gator", Natas and Stedam.

Funny that some 25 years later (a few weeks ago) i'd get a call from an advertising agency wanting to use some old skate images of mine of Tony Alva for a new campaign they are working on, I let them know immediately that normally i would just say no out of hand, in assisting in the promotion of any corporate products, but since it was going to make good money for Tony who i know really could use it, and due to my old former brand loyalty as a teenager and twenty something, i figured maybe i'll consider... I did some research and found out that Pepsi as a corporation certainly was not as bad as Coke, they had actually done some pretty cool things. They were boycotted last year by a bunch of ultra right wingers who were mad they "gave a total of $1,000,000 to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays", and had recently even sold off some of their uglier assets such a Burger King and some other horrible food chains. The new campaign was pretty cool and even included Bob Dylan's blessing (using a lot of old/new comparisons).
I said tell me how the image will be used, and no you can't use one of my iconic images from Fuck You Heroes for any price, but maybe another less known image from the same period, and i'll think about it. They got back to me saying any shot i think would be good they would consider, but then i found out the usage and exploitation factor of the shot... Out of sheer curiosity I asked what kind of budget they had for the photos, they said they were paying a few thousand dollars an image, I had to laugh, a major campaign in more than a dozen major cities across the US? I told them there was no way i'd do it for anything less than six figures, i thought relatively speaking this was fair (even though i had never received that much for a legal usage before - sometimes it's just fun to fuck with these advertising people - obviously i'd be giving some of the money to causes that campaign against obesity or something like that if they actually paid it). They said they had no authorization for that much and would have to ask the client, I said if you want the best you obviously have to pay for it, if it was a charity project i'd give it away, but c'mon this is one of the largest corporations on the planet, "they hired your agency, what's that cost?" (silence)... In the end, she was polite and wrote me an e-mail back after a few days, they decided to go with another image from another photographer that Tony recommended, I'm sure it was probably Wynn Miller, who was pretty much Tony's personal photographer back in 1978 and he got some great shots of Tony back then, although often a bit over produced for my taste. I sure hope he got paid better than what they told me they were offering...