I was going to include this as a comment, but it got too long and I had some other points to make as well.

Okay, good points in comments (Heather, I told you I'd throw in a marketing post every so often) and I understand what you are saying.

However, I think that philosophy for advertising needs works better on smaller companies fighting for market share, unlike, say, Coke and Pepsi.  Even the young generation...they are going to drink what their parents have in the house.  And let's be real...say coke were to stop all the seemingly extraneous (i.e. non-new product) advertising, would the net of customers resulting (lost to Pepsi) really outweigh the revenue expenditure of the heavy-duty national advertising?  Does the customer-gain from Pepsi due to advertising exceed the money spent?  Does Sierra Mist really pose that much of a threat?  Maybe to the 7-UP and Sprite product managers, but on the whole I think the threat is small.  And even if the threat is real, Sierra Mist isn't a "cola".  So Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola are still only battling each other.  Let Sprite, 7-Up, and SM have the ad battle.  That would at least make more sense to me.

Jason, yes, Pepsi and Coke, and anyone else, needs to start brand-building somewhere, and that's where the ad dollars should be spent.  But once the brand is built, that doesn't mean that you have to blitz the name to perpetuity.  In fact, it starts to lose power after a while...how many people say "I'm getting a coke" when they really mean any number of soft drinks?  The brand has made its way into the vernacular.  Nobody is in any danger of forgetting that Pepsi and Coke exist.  New people are born every minute into houses that are already full of people who know what Pepsi and Coke are, so no need to advertise to the babies.

Again, anyone who cares, who really has a preference of one over the other (assuming a two-brand fight) is going to stick with that brand regardless of marketing.  I will not drink Pepsi unless I have to, and if I do, then I drink Mountain Dew rather than Pepsi Cola.  No ad will change that.  Pepsi cannot "go after" this Coke customer with ads.  What they can do is product diversification, and, as I mentioned earlier, advertise new products.  I drink Mountain Dew a lot.  Pepsi has me on the "citrus-flavored caffeineated beverage" market.  Coke has me everywhere else.  When Pepsi comes out with a new Mountain Dew flavor, it's almost Pavlovian the way I run out and buy it the first time I hear about it.  That sort of advertising makes sense to me.

Anyone who doesn't care, who thinks cola is cola, is also, in my opinion, not going to be that swayed by advertising.  They will drink whatever is cheaper/available/cold already.  They will buy a case of coke this week because it's the one on sale when they go to the supermarket.  Pepsi next week.  These people are nobody's customer, and they will not be bought by advertising.

I come from more of a Direct-To-Consumer advertising background that I have had extensive experience with.  This is advertising that calls the customer to action (Call this number.  Visit this website.) and has a tangible result.  With the right software and the right logistics, you can track every dollar spent on advertising to a result, and know exactly how effective your advertising is.  I have built that system for a company and it has run quite effectively.  Specific ads, specific calls to action, trackable performance (call a certain number, visit a certain website), and you know, at the end of the day, what's what.  You can change your strategy on the fly.

The type of advertising we're discussing, continuing to use Pepsi and Coke as examples, is unreportable.  There is no direct correlation of dollars spent to dollars made.  You have no idea what the true effectiveness of the ad campaign is.  This may be why I (mistakenly, possibly) consider this type of advertising to be "branding", because the only thing you know for a fact is that people saw the ad and now possibly have your company fresh in mind.

But is that really effective advertising?  Or is it throwing money in a well and hoping your wish comes true?  Maybe it's the engineer in me, but I think it's the latter.

As another example, look at some IBM commercials from a few years back.  Server commercials.  Infrastructure commercials.  Commercials where the subject matter was targeting business decision makers, a small, I would venture to say very small, subset of the people who watched the commercial.  I would say that 999 out of 1000, if not more, of the people seeing that commercial will never, that is never, be faced with the decision of what server to buy, and does not even know what a server rack is, or why it's impressive that an old-school server "clean-room" has been reduced to a single rack.  These commercials have scripts, actors, high production quality, non-auction timeslot runs during prime-time network television...IOW are not cheap by any stretch.  Is this effective money spent?  Should shareholders stand for this marketing approach?  I'll tell ya, I won't invest in a company that is so willing to throw away money on marketing.

Maybe this is just wrongheadedness on my part, and I'm not approaching this from the right angle.  I'm just trying to understand, because honestly, it boggles my mind.