Peter Sealey, the longtime Coca-Cola marketing executive who spent six years with Columbia Pictures after the soft-drink company acquired the studio in 1982, has died. He was 82.
Sealey died Dec. 15 in Palm Springs of complications from a fall, his family announced.
When the Coca-Cola Co. bought Columbia for $750 million, Sealey became president of global marketing and distribution for the historic studio, and he contributed his marketing expertise to such movies as Tootsie (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), The Karate Kid (1984), Stand by Me (1986) and La Bamba (1987).
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Sealey exited Coke in 1993 and reinvented himself as a global speaker, consultant, expert witness and adviser to such Fortune 50 companies as United Parcel Service, General Motors and Sony Corp., which acquired Columbia in 1989 for $3.4 billion.
He also joined the advisory board of Facebook at its infancy with only 12 employees and was a pioneer in predicting the impact of social media.
Born on Aug. 16, 1940, in Tampa, Florida, Sealey graduated from the University of Florida, then earned his master’s degree in business from Yale and his Ph.D. in information technology from the Drucker School of Management at Claremont University in California.
In 1963, Sealey spent a summer as an intern in Procter & Gamble’s Cincinnati office and helped redesign the label for the Jif peanut butter account. Back at Yale six months later, he was in a grocery store in New Haven, Connecticut, when he happened upon his work.
“I was blown away,” Sealey said in an interview last year. “That was my introduction to marketing. To see my work on a shelf in the grocery store made a huge impact on my life.”
Sealey spent more than two decades years at Coke, and as global chief marketing officer, he helped kick off the “Always Coca-Cola” campaign that was highlighted by commercials featuring soda-drinking polar bears.
“People would call our offices and ask when that commercial would air again so they could see it,” he said. “I’m proud of the impact of that campaign.”
Sealey also served as a professor at Stanford, UC Berkeley and Claremont.
Among his philanthropic efforts, Sealey endowed a marketing professorship at the University of Florida and the Peter and Elizabeth Sealey Adoption Center at the Palm Springs Animal Shelter.
He also was a huge donor to Palm Springs’ Eisenhower Hospital, where the Peter and Elizabeth Sealey Specialty Clinics are named for him and his wife.
In addition to his wife, survivors include his daughters, Caran and Rainey; stepdaughters Katherine and Jane; sons-in-law Mike, Andrew and Sergiu; five grandchildren; and dogs Megan and Franky.
