In 1964 PepsiCo bought the franchise, bringing Mountain Dew into the national marketplace. The label, as well as the drink itself, embodied the moonshiner days of 1920 through 1933, when Prohibition made the use of alcohol illegal in the United States. Slang for moonshine, and invented in the Tennessee hills in the 1940s, Mountain Dew was originally used as a mixer with whiskey. The agent represented a revenuer, one whose job was to stop bootlegging. The old red-and-white labels featured a hillbilly shooting at a government agent fleeing an outhouse. Tennessee's Tri-City Beverage became the first Mountain Dew franchise in 1954, and by 1958 it had adorned the bottle with Mountain Dew's first logo. The problem was that sales of soft drinks were declining as consumers chose healthier beverages such as bottled water and juice. By 2002 Code Red sales numbers had begun to dwindle, and in 2003 its sales volume dropped 37 percent. Advertising awards for the campaign included a Gold EFFIE Award, one of the most prestigious honors in the ad industry.
PepsiCo's overall third-quarter 2001 net income jumped an astonishing 22 percent, largely because of Code Red. These spots ran through 2003, when two new television commercials, "Mascot" and "Football Court," were introduced.īy September 2001 Code Red had become the fifth-best-selling soft drink in convenience stores. The initial spots featured NBA stars Tracy McGrady and Chris Webber as well as singer and actress Macy Gray. Television commercials were added in October 2001. A "teaser campaign" accompanying the launch consisted of print ads and radio spots with an urban, multicultural focus. A month later Code Red was finally distributed to stores. Prior to placing the product onto store shelves, PepsiCo offered samples to extreme-sports enthusiasts at the February 2001 X Games and established a Code Red game on the Mountain Dew website in April 2001. Working with ad agency BBDO New York, Pepsi introduced Code Red slowly, beginning within the target market of the original Dew instead of the new target market. While Mountain Dew's target market had long been young, white males interested in extreme sports, Code Red's market was to be ethnically diverse and urban. The new cherry-flavored beverage was to be marketed in a different direction than the original Dew. To revive sales Pepsi introduced a bright-red version of the original called Mountain Dew Code Red. While Mountain Dew's sales growth had often been in the double digits since the 1970s, by the turn of the century, growth had trickled to around 2 percent. Even so, since the 1990s soft-drink sales overall had been seriously declining. In 2001 PepsiCo's Mountain Dew was the fourth-best-selling soft drink on the U.S. QUAKER-WARMS YOU, HEART AND SOUL CAMPAIGN
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