Pepsi, meet Sammy. Sammy, Pepsi.

David Wen, over at The Ranch, asked to see the Pepsi spot called “Taco Stand.”

We shot it in 2004 in Phoenix when Sammy Sosa was in camp for Spring Training and it’s another spot shot under the old Pepsi strategy of Pepsi + Food = Good.

Often, when you’re working with celebrity talent who’s not accustomed to performing in front of a camera (like sports celebs), you have to do unusual things to get a natural performance out of them.

In the case of “Taco Stand,” there’s a gag toward the end of the spot where the kid reveals his true motivation for wanting to give Sosa a free meal. When we presented the boards to Sammy, we left the gag off the frames so, when it was revealed on camera, we’d get a good reaction out of him.

The icing-on-the-cake gesture from the kid that happens immediately afterwards came about after I ad libbed it on-set. We had a couple thousand feet of film left in one of the canisters so we worked out one or two alternate endings to shoot in order to finish off the roll.

For one, I worked out a line involving Jason Giambi that we shot but wound up not using (the accent of the guy standing behind the counter of the Taco Stand was just too heavy to be useable) and, after we shot that, we spun the camera around looking for another alternative.

Acting out the kid’s role, I threw on the ball cap and flashed a pretty recognizable hand sign that caused Sammy and the set to crack up. I tossed the cap back to the kid, we rolled film and got it in the can; it made it into the final cut.

If you’re looking for a Hispanic insight (even though this was a General Market spot), you should know that Sammy, like most Caribbean Latinos, has a different palate when it comes to “heat” and spicy foods than Latinos from, say, Mexico.

The baseball insight is pretty obvious. (I should mention I’m a Sox fan.)

The spot garnered some pretty good national press and I was interviewed by a radio sports talk show in Chicago. Even though they say, on the air, that I am in Dallas (the agency is in Dallas), they lie: I was in Los Angeles doing a final transfer for a Taco Bell spot I’d just shot and edited, and getting up for the interview was a true pain in the ass.

You can listen to the interview here:

Like “Tamal” (by the way, I’ve added the final “for air” version of it at the end of the original “Tamal” entry), “Taco Stand” won a smattering of awards and sent me to Cannes where it received more applause than whistles and made the short list (the same year our Young Creatives took Silver). Baseball isn’t followed in many places outside our Hemisphere, so I was happy just to be in the cote d’azur (and I took my francophile She Monkey along for the ride).

Here’s the spot (it’s 19 megs, I think):

Pepsi — Taco Stand — :30

I get a CD/CW credit, my partner at the time, Jaime Andrade, gets a CD credit and Christian Blanco fills out the AD slot. Aldo Quevedo, of course, is the agency ECD.

Email Article Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 12:27pm Mack Simpson

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