Alan Pottasch

Alan Maxwell Pottasch (August 13, 1927 in Long Island, NY – July 27, 2007 in Los Angeles) was an American advertising executive and marketer best known for his five decades of work for PepsiCo. Specifically, Pottasch is best known as the creator behind the "Pepsi Generation" advertising campaign.

Alan Pottasch was born on August 13, 1927, on Long Island in New York. He grew up in New York City. Pottasch enlisted and served in the United States Navy during World War II.

Pottasch enrolled at Pennsylvania State University following World War II. He graduated from Penn State in 1949 with a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing. Pottasch went to a directors school and went on to work at a television station in Dallas, Texas, and as a producer-director at ABC-TV.

Alan Pottasch began working for Pepsico in 1957. The year that Pottasch joined Pepsico, Coca-Cola outsold Pepsi by a six to one margin in the United States.

Under Pottasch, the "Pepsi Generation" marketing campaign was launched in 1963. Pottasch's "Pepsi Generation" marketing campaign has been called groundbreaking because it focused on the "attributes" of the consumers buying Pepsi's products (sometimes called "selling a way of life"), not just attributes of the product itself, such as price or taste. This was a very uncommon marketing strategy for a company in the early 1960s. The campaign and Pepsi Generation theme was launched and aimed at young Baby Boomers just as they were becoming an important consumer and demographic group. The campaign was a risk for Pepsi. Years later Pottasch said in a podcast posted on Yahoo's "Giants of Advertising" web site, "For us to name and claim a whole generation after our product was a rather courageous thing that we weren't sure would take off."

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