Johnson & Johnson and Saatchi & Saatchi advertised Tylenol in Super Bowl XXX with a UFO-meets-the-living room convention of sports stars talking about pain management ("Eddie George"). For J&J’s Pepcid AC ad in the same game, they kept things a little more prosaic. “I can’t believe this heartburn,” a sleepless woman says to her partner in the middle of the night. “You and your ‘Let’s go Mexican tonight.’” (They work it out.)
The ad was the Super Bowl debut for a product that only reached shelves 19 months earlier, in June 1995, after it became the first nonprescription heartburn remedy to receive FDA approval. Pecid AC would soon square off against Zantac 75 from Warner Wellcome Consumer Health Care and Tagamet HB from SmithKline Beecham, which kicked off the whole OTC heartburn treatment war when it saw that its prescription-only Tagamet was about to come off patent.
Pepcid and Saatchi returned to the game for Super Bowl XXXI with "Dear Coach."
BRAND: Pepcid AC
YEAR: 1996
AGENCY: Saatchi & Saatchi
SUPERBOWL: XXX