Advertising is a relatively staid and decorous means of doing battle in the contemporary cognitive marketplace, compared to some of the other means that have come into vogue.

Consider the practice of attempting to turn movies into extended quasi-subliminal advertising. Coca-Cola entered the field in a major way in 1982, when it bought 49 percent of Columbia Pictures.  Columbia's 1985 release, Murphy's Romance, illustrates some of the effects of the change in ownership.

Much of the action in Murphy's Romance takes place in a pleasantly old-fashioned drugstore owned by a benevolent James Garner, which is introduced in a sequence that shows not one, but three prominent Coca-Cola signs, on the exterior alone. Sally Field then meets James Garner in the following exchange:

Field: 1'11 have a banana split. No, I won't. 1'11 have a Coke.

Garner: A Coke?

Field: A lemon Coke.

In addition to its efforts to associate Coke with pleasant experiences, the movie also works to build negative associations for rival Pepsi. For example, when Sally Field's son's request for a supermarket job is coldly turned down, the supermarket's walls are adorned with two enormous, almost totemic Pepsi signs.

Other Columbia movies from the Coca-Cola era show a similar preference for attempting to boost soft drink sales over cultivating cinematic artistry.

Pepsico responded to the challenge virtually at once, designating a special manager to arrange equivalent types of quasi-subliminal plugs for Pepsi in other companies' films. In these movies, the use of Pepsi is not just an offshoot of realistic prop selection.

For example, in Always, Holly Hunter stands in a pantry entirely filled with made-up or unidentifiable products, with the sole exception of a six pack of Pepsi--which, by its central position and dramatic lighting, actually upstages the star.

Pepsico also maneuvered against Coke in the videocassette version of Dirty Dancing, declining to place an ad unless the video company cut every scene that showed a Coca-Cola sign.

The use of movies as advertising is considerably less subtle in other films. In the 007 thriller License to Kill, James Bond ostentatiously smokes Larks--a plug for which Philip Morris paid more than a quarter of a million dollars.