the shrewdness of apes

while reserching the previous entry, i came across this article from a May 2001 Brandweek magazine concerning PowerAde and their attempts to wrangle more market share from Gatorade, blah blah blah. among such advo-babble as "Coca-Cola earlier this month pledged to turn up the volume for its sports drink" and the nausea-inducing fact that they had budgeted $60 million for the campaign, they interviewed a brand manager from the company. 4 months later, there's no way he would have gotten away with saying this:

"We're going to war. We will have an air attack and ground attack. If we just do a ground attack we will get annihilated from the air. We have great grass roots properties. [Gatorade's] going down."

does it shock anyone else that people get paid to care about this garbage?