Bebida Beverage Company (BBDA)

[OlafKjelldsen]

No commercial this month?

I think the whole 'Walmart asked to push it back because of back-to-school sales' is a crock. Walmart does business with thousands of vendors all over the world - they are not in the business of micro-managing and orchestrating when other companies run their ads, but they do have a say in the content if it uses their brand or logo.

Based on my observations of what happened in the past when the company tried to co-opt J-Lo's song title for a t-shirt after they paid for a product placement in her video, I am going to hazard a guess that something similar was attempted with the Walmart brand and the commercial. Walmart requires all advertising that uses their logo to be submitted for approval. It fell outside of Walmart's acceptable use policies and they told Bebevco the commercial couldn't be run until it adhered to their guidelines. Perhaps there's a delay in getting the video done to Walmart's specs. They do talk about quality and not making the logo look ridiculous, so just slapping the logo onto a commercial with the same production standards as the existing KU commercial on the website (the WM commercial was being made by the same outfit) may not have passed muster. Maybe Bebevco is having to pay a real, professional agency to create a commercial rather than some cut-rate stuff put together by one of his racing buddies on the cheap.

If you are interested, you can review how seriously Walmart takes usage of its logo and brand:

http://walmartbrandcenter.com/logorequest/

If you go to the Walmart site and look at this week's sales flyers

http://localad.walmart.com

There's nothing about back-to-school in the SC flyer. About the only focus in there is on the start of football season. There's some school supplies on about page 26, and Koma Unwind is not in the food section. Translation: Back-to-school is over and Walmart is not making a special, timed push of Koma Unwind in its wake.