Pepsi and the #brand #identity #crisis
By Eric Newcomer
“I love the Pepsi ad. I mean I don’t know if Pepsi intended it to be funny, but it was really funny.” That’s my friend Katie in a group text with our friend Tom.
If you don’t know what she’s talking about, go watch the ad (even though Pepsi pulled it, you can still find it on YouTube); then read this take on Bloomberg; absorb some civil rights memes; chuckle at Jezebel’s play-by-play; and come back to us. (Basically, Pepsi ran a political ad that is so milquetoast, it’s insulting.)
“The outrage over the Pepsi ad is so fake. People didn’t like it because it’s true,” Tom texted.
“Gen y LOVES brands,” Katie added. “They should love the idea that brands can end police brutality… Pepsi just out and out says it and suddenly it seems crass… if you think that activism = clicking the like and angrily tweeting, how can you be mad at Pepsi?”
Like Tom and Katie, it’s hard for me to take this Pepsi ad uproar too seriously. I love the tweet that said, “If you think that commercial is problematic, just wait until you hear about capitalism,” and I’ve been listening to George Carlin scatting about advertising on repeat. Basically, ads are in the business of pandering to us. What’s new? This one just did it really poorly.
However, since I write about business, I can’t help but notice brands are having a bit of an identity crisis lately. The debate seems to be over how brands should stand up for their values and what values exactly we should expect them to have.
The battlefield raging over at YouTube is something hardcore. First, Disney pulled its support for YouTube celebrity PewDiePie after a Wall Street Journal article highlighted how he’d made one-too-many anti-Semitic “jokes.” The backlash from internet trolls in defense of PewDiePie has been extreme.
Then YouTube advertisers flipped out when they started getting calls from reporters informing them that their ads were running alongside racist and homophobic YouTube videos. My colleague Mark Bergen wrote about how Google is trying to better flag objectionable videos to appease advertisers. He also recorded a great podcast on the topic.
Meanwhile, some companies that sell to millennials are trying to get into the headlines, not out of them. An array of brands, from makeup company Glossier to the building supply business 84 Lumber, have cast themselves as anti-Trump in their advertisements.
If you follow the ad industry, it’s almost trite to point out that consumer research shows Americans overwhelmingly want advertisers to publicly take political and moral stands. And companies have done this effectively. Dove, as one Redditor notes eloquently, won over fans with its Real Beauty campaign, which first started running more than a decade ago. And they’re all just following in the footsteps of the Pepsi Generation, an award-winning 1960s campaign that helped pioneer lifestyle marketing.
Clearly, Pepsi wanted to harken back to that style with something savvy and hip that portrays it as the soft drink of choice for the socially conscious. Who doesn’t want to be woke?
As I think almost everyone has concluded, Pepsi didn’t take a serious stance, despite enlisting such a prominent political activist as Kendall Jenner. It came off as insincere. In a divided country, companies that want to speak out are going to have to commit to one viewpoint or another, or risk alienating both.
“The brilliant thing about the Pepsi ad is there’s no way they can lose here. The whole internet is talking about it. They pulled the ad because they got too tired of winning,” Tom wrote. “You know how sometimes people who don’t speak English fluently mess up a turn of phrase, but it ends up being more true than the actual turn of phrase? That’s basically Pepsi.”
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