Controversial video advertising and Anand Pandian’s “Reel World”
“Films can make things happen — in zeal and in boredom, with contemplation and indignation, for better and for worse. But everything turns on how we conceive of this efficacy, how we understand these effects to work both in and beyond cinematic worlds.” — Anand Pandian, Reel World, Page 270
By now, most of you have probably seen (or at least heard about) the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad. The three-minute video shows Jenner abandoning a photo shoot to join a protest. As Jenner walks into the crowd, she joins people of all races who are marching together in apparent harmony. With inspirational music playing in the background, tension builds until Jenner hands a police officer a cold Pepsi, and the crowd starts cheering.
Who knew? All along, Pepsi has been the perfect solution to racism, systemic violence, and police brutality. The ad is a mess, and it has been widely criticized as tone-deaf and inappropriate. It’s a misguided, whitewashed money grab that seeks to cash in on recent social movements like Black Lives Matter.
So, how does Pandian fit in here? He is fascinated by the relationship between cinema and reality, and how each informs the other. He argues that “films can make things happen” — think, for example, of how often we blame shootings on violence in movies. The real world and the reel world, then, influence each other, though the extent of that influence is in flux.
Let us loosen the definition of cinema here to include video advertisement. Let’s also accept the following pieces of Pandian’s argument as true: film represents reality, and film can make things happen. The Pepsi ad falls in short in both of these areas. It inaccurately represents reality, and its imagined outcomes are inappropriate.
What was Pepsi’s goal here? Through cinema, the company wanted to “make things happen” — but only conditionally. Pepsi hoped to influence reality through film by encouraging more young people to buy Pepsi products. Pepsi wanted to capitalize on the unity and energy of protest movements, but not the actual disruptive effects of organized resistance. So, Pepsi had a problem. It needed to make a film that represented reality, but that film could not “make things happen.”
That’s precisely why the ad failed. Its source material is a social movement, one that seeks to correct injustice. But Pepsi doesn’t want revolution. It wants you to buy soda. The cinematic world of the advertisement is hoping to make things happen in the real world, but there is a disconnect between the two. Pepsi has tried to force a connection between current reality, cinema, and future reality, and that connection has fallen flat. Instead of inspiring, the ad is crass and tacky.
Pepsi was shooting for a timely ad with minimal efficacy. Obviously, Pepsi does not want a revolution. It doesn’t want organized resistance against capitalism, against the status quo. So, in this ad, we get a whitewashed, middle-class-friendly resistance, where buying Pepsi is a safe but progressive act. Thus, the film represents an inaccurate reality in order to produce specific but ill-conceived results.
As Pandian writes, “everything turns on” perceptions of film’s efficacy in affecting reality. Central to the ad’s failure is the fact that there is a disconnect between how the viewers and how the creators “conceive of this efficacy.” Pepsi believed that its ad would effectively encourage viewers to buy Pepsi products, while not worrying about accurately representing reality. Viewers criticized the cinematic world of the ad because it was an inaccurate representation of the world, and thus they found it inappropriate.
In other words, the ad failed because Pepsi misunderstood the relationship between cinema and reality. But, when all is said and done, it should be acknowledged that Pepsi used cinema to “make things happen.” After all, people have started drinking Coke instead.
