Wrong one baby, uh huh

In case you haven’t seen it, the Pepsi ad that caused an online stir this week features – among other things – a protest in the streets of an unnamed city, and Kendall Jenner forging peace between police and protesters by offering an officer a can of Pepsi. It co-opts everything from Black Lives Matter to the recent Women’s March. It trivializes the work of groups and the individuals within them who organize these marches, and suppresses how legitimately dangerous it is to partake in peaceful protest. As Black Lives Matter leader Johnetta Elsie said on Thursday, “I could never hand the police a Pepsi. If I hand them anything, I’m getting bodyslammed, or shot.”

Pepsi pulled the ad a day after it premiered, apologizing for its “tone-deafness.” In its appropriation of the imagery associated with civil rights initiatives, Pepsi’s messaging was brazen and heinous, sure. But it was also a one-two punch of old-school advertising strategy: make it relevant, and make it aspirational.

Brands have been adopting cultural movements for decades. In 1971, the Coca-Cola company debuted one of the most famous advertisements in history: Hilltop, the TV commercial featuring a diverse cadre of young people standing on the side of a mountain, singing that they’d “like to buy the world a Coke.” The explicit message is that sharing a soda can bring about peace, which was particularly poignant when the United States was embroiled in opposition to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Act was still brand-new. The implicit message, though, was that some ad man had been watching the news.

The ad and its origins circulated again heavily in 2015, after it was featured in the series finale of Mad Men. In the final scene, Don Draper is on a hilltop at a hippie retreat, eyes closed in meditation. For a second, you think he’s found himself. He smiles as the scene cuts to black, and “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” plays over the closing credits. It’s easy to imagine Draper marching among the throngs in Washington on January 21, putting on his Ray-Bans and thinking, “I can bottle this.”

In 1971, there wasn’t much outcry. So if there is a silverlining from this week’s Pepsi imbroglio, it’s that the gradual mainstreaming of anti-oppressive thinking has led to an informed populace that won’t stand for this kind of crap anymore. What passed muster in 1971 doesn’t fly in 2017. At least not when it’s so obvious.