• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 6, 2005

After a seven-year absence from the red carpet, Coca-Cola Co. is back in the Oscar ad race. The soft-drink marketer Friday announced that it muscled rival Pepsi-Cola out of a category exclusivity for ABC's coverage of the Academy Awards telecast, one of a handful of major network TV events guaranteed to draw a mass audience and to attract water-cooler buzz surrounding new advertising campaigns that appear on the show.

While Coca-Cola did not disclose the terms of the deals, or whether it was a long-term arrangement, the move signals a push to lock up the kind of premium television events archrival Pepsi has been so good at leveraging in recent years. In fact, Coca-Cola Co. said the Oscars deal would "activate" an array of highly visible TV events kicking off in 2006, including NBC's coverage of the Olympic Winter Games, the World Cup, "American Idol," the NCAA college basketball playoffs, the NBC, NASCAR, and NHRA.

The Oscars, which are often referred to as the "Super Bowl for women" because of their relatively high female viewer composition, in fact, rank second only to Super Bowl telecasts in terms of total viewers. That said, PepsiCo, not Coca-Cola Co., has dominated advertising in the Big Game in recent years.

Coca-Cola Co. would not reveal its strategy for the Oscar telecast, but it said it would air seven commercials featuring its Diet Coke and other Coca-Cola brands.