Pepsi tried to teach the (white) world to be woke, and failed miserably
What could go wrong? A soundtrack by Skip Marley and the hyper-media figure of Kendall Jenner at the heart of a simple story of realising ones destiny.
It could all have gone so well for Pepsi, if they had just managed to avoid messing up on one simple thing — the story itself.
This was the great Pepsi advert disaster of April 2017, which will probably be discussed in media classes for longer than people will remember who Kendall Jenner is (unless, of course, she eventually becomes the US President).
It was an advert that tried to evoke many similar Cola/Pepsi adverts of the past: with lots of happy, serious but smiling young people of ‘all backgrounds’ making the world a better place by their consumption (and sharing) of a sweetened, carbonated, and artificially-flavoured chilled drink.
I’m old enough to remember the New Seekers telling us in 1971 that they would ‘Like to Buy the World a Coke’ (after, of course, teaching us all to sing in perfect harmony). This has been the white-gold standard of happy, beautiful multicultural commercialism.
Presumably, Pepsi were hoping to hit that same spot for 2017.
An image of Kendall Jenner handing a riot policeman a can of Pepsi could have become iconic for the age. Perhaps it is, in an alternative universe (after all, stranger things have happened in the past year).
But that didn’t happen. If the image becomes iconic, it will be representative of the facile misunderstanding (or deliberate misrepresentation) of the violence and conflict of the racial divisions in today’s America.
Twitter did its thing.
Most memorably from Bernice King:
‘If only Daddy would have known about the power of Pepsi’.
The real-world contrasts with contemporary protests were not lost:
‘We did this in Baltimore. Nothing changed Pepsi’.
And obvious connections were made between the image of Jenner and the truly iconic image of Iesha Evans facing down riot police in Baton Rouge in July 2016.
There is no doubt that Pepsi misjudged their marketing and made a very costly mistake.
Without the instant force of Twitter it is possible that this advert would have gone out via TV and cinemas, straight to its intended audience — progressive whites who vaguely sympathise with Black Lives Matter without having any strong commitment or understanding of the movement. The feel-good-by-thinking-about-going-on-a-protest demographic may well have lapped (or gulped) the symbolism up enough to make it a success. There would inevitably have been protests, most likely from the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ demographic who would have complained about the film’s glorification of illegal (terrorist) protestors.
But none of this was given the chance to happen, and within less than twenty-four hours Pepsi announced that the advert had been withdrawn.
It is very clear what was at stake within the imagery of the advert.
But it was also complicated, particularly by the confusion on the part of its makers about what it meant by the idea of protest and resistance.
Much of the deserved criticism of Pepsi’s marketing is the whitewashing, re-racialising, and the removal of real life violence from its portrayal.
As we see from the juxtaposition of Iesha Evans with Jenner’s role — a viral image of a black woman, facing violence and possibly death is transformed into a white woman for whom the threat of violence is minimalised. The policeman is too nice and she is too white.
It was in effect an ‘all lives matter’ type of Pepsi moment. But unlike Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, or Michael Brown, the Jenner character knows she is safe.
This may have been because the protest was not in fact a typical Black Lives Matter type of event. It was too white for that — that is, a BLM protest does not usually have so many white protestors (either with or without Pepsis).
The white demographic who this advert was aimed at do not tend to support BLM. They are, on the whole, more likely to blandly assume that ‘all lives matter’ is a sufficient response to the brutality and outrage of so many black lives being taken by the forces who represent law and order.
And this is part of the confusion (or deliberate ambiguity) of the film. It appears to have drawn its central imagery from Black Lives Matter, but its more general premise was drawn from a different set of protests — from the Resistance and in particular the Women’s Marches against Trump in January 2017.
Although there has been overlap, the BLM and the Women’s March protests are not the same. The latter are much larger, more mainstream, and of course more white — although by no means exclusively so. The ‘pussy hats’ and safe, family feel of these anti-Trump marches are seen as being a long way from the long-term anger of BLM.
It is the more ‘mainstream’ vibe of the Women’s Marches that Pepsi were trying to buy (and sell) into. But they could not resist the temptation to mix that together with the more ‘subversive’ edge of Black Lives Matter.
However, the advert was in particular an exercise in marketing whiteness — a contemporary 2017 idea of being white in an era of white supremacy and racial intolerance. The film was an attempt to counter such overt alt-right racism, and did so in various ways — not least by putting a hijabed Muslim women in a key role.
This Pepsi imagery is, therefore, a whiteness that can live in peace and co-operation in a multicultural environment and can literally be woke to social injustice.
At the point when Jenner realises she must protest she is seen to open her eyes and waken. In doing so, she removes her bleach-blond wig and lipstick, transforming her whiteness, but not losing it.
And in doing so, she does not lose her privilege either. Her first act is to throw her old identity (in particular her wig) into the hands of the black employee on the photo shoot, who is obviously unimpressed.
She then indulges in the ultimate privilege of such whiteness: in approaching a police officer carrying something in her hands, and she survives the encounter.
Many Americans want to resist. They do not want the ‘America first’ ethnic discord of Trump, Bannon, and Sessions, and they want to feel they are doing something to put things back to a time of tolerance and harmony.
However, that America has never really existed. Iesha Evans was photographed whilst protesting against the taking of a black life that did not matter enough, during the time of Obama not Trump. Black Lives Matter protest and suffer at the hands of riot police because of centuries of violence based on protecting the power of whiteness.
And perhaps this is where the Pepsi advert may succeed, in a somewhat ironic way. Through its failure.
Its failure was the failure of much of well-meaning white America.
It was a failure to recognise endemic violence that lies at the heart of its system.
It was a failure to see that there has been a need for resistance and challenge against the misuse of power since long before the election of Trump.
It was a failure that the gap between the civil rights activism of Martin Luther King Jnr and others in the 1960s and the civil rights activism of Black Lives Matter today represents a lack of progress.
The crass insensitivity of the Pepsi advert shows there is something very real that needs to be shown sensitivity. That is, the simple premise that black lives really do matter. This should be a crucial priority for all those who wish to distance their sense of whiteness from the militant terrorism of the openly white supremacist presidency.
No matter how woke and bolder they may wish to be, America’s problem remains very much as WEB Du Bois identified it over one hundred years ago.
It is the problem of the colour line.
And a can of Pepsi is never going to be the solution.
Malory Nye is an academic and writer who teaches at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He can be found on Twitter (@malorynye) and on his website, malorynye.com.
He produces two podcasts: Religion Bites and History’s Ink.
Malory Nye is also the author of the books Religion the Basics (2008) and There Shall be an Independent Scotland (2015).
