April 5, 2017

Pepsi Has Done Something to Annoy Some People. But Wait! It’s Halley’s Comet!

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The big topic of this particular micro-instant is the new Pepsi ad. What new Pepsi ad? you ask, if you’re completely detached from all the important social memes of modern life. Fine. For you laggards, here’s the ad. It seems to come in different versions, but I think this is the full one:

Over at the Washington Post, Elahe Izadi captures the general reaction to this ad in a piece titled “A second-by-second breakdown of Kendall Jenner’s unspeakably tone-deaf Pepsi ad.” That about sums it up. People are pissed, and I probably don’t need to explain why.

So why did Pepsi do it? Because they don’t really care if people are pissed. They just want attention, and they got it. The very fact that everyone is writing and blogging and tweeting earnestly about how terrible this ad is means it’s done its job. As long as Pepsi can stay just to one side of the Bill O’Reilly line—truly widespread protests that lead to boycotts etc.—this is a win.

Besides, progressives are the only ones who care about this, and in modern America you can count on us forgetting about it pretty quickly because Donald Trump is almost certain to do something soon to distract all. Maybe tomorrow he’ll threaten Xi Jinping that he’s going to bomb Beijing unless China reduces its trade deficit with the US. Or hell, maybe he’ll offer to bomb Taipei if China will take out North Korea for us. Who knows?

UPDATE: I guess Pepsi decided they were getting perilously close to the wrong side of the O’Reilly line. Alternatively, they figured they’d gotten all the attention they were going to, so they might as well kill the ad:

I think Pepsi’s marketing mavens should have paid less attention to this year’s Super Bowl ads and more attention to SNL’s sketch skewering them:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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