Everybody wants a piece of Obamamania

I'm not sure it's an accident that the new Pepsi logo is strongly evocative of the Obama campaign logo. And now, in what would otherwise be a Super Bowl ad, Pepsi has, in one of the best TV spots I've seen in a long time, linked its long history to the theme of "generations" -- just in time for the inauguration:

I just love this ad. It's fantastic on so many levels, few of them having to do with promoting a cola drink. I love its theme of continuity; the way it points out that every generation is a product of its time, and the way it recognizes that generations who are old now, or whom are long dead, had their time in the sun, and the opportunity to have an impact on the world. Of course they conveniently left out the 1930's, and PepsiCo wants to show that all of them drank Pepsi, but there's a kind of profundity in this fun minute of advertising that we rarely see in product promotion these days.