Baffling Nivea, Pepsi ads provoke viral backlash
A very bad week for online ads prompts the question: Don’t advertisers use focus groups anymore?
Testers surrender their time and opinions, typically in return for a modest honorarium. The folks behind the mirrored glass can evaluate if a planned campaign connects with soccer moms, or earns a snicker from a skinhead in a Pepe the Frog T-shirt.
Such exercises are meant to prevent the type of embarrassment recently suffered by Nivea, when its antiperspirant ad became a rallying cry for white supremacists.
On a Facebook page targeting Middle Eastern subscribers, Nivea ran an ad for a non-staining deodorant called “Invisible for Black and White.” A woman in a white bathrobe is pictured from behind, ombré hair hanging in loose curls. Of all the taglines tossed around, somehow they ran with: “White is purity.”
A predictable flood of consternation ensued as white nationalists surfaced from the depths to claim Nivea as one of their own. One far-right account tweeted, apparently without irony, “#Nivea: the official moisturizer/ anti-perspirant of the #AltRight.”
The ad was quickly withdrawn. Parent company Beiersdorf called it “misleading” and affirmed Nivea’s commitment to diversity and equal opportunity.
Some accused the ad’s critics of being oversensitive. Still it’s not hard to guess why white nationalists were all a-twitter over the promotion of white purity. The more baffling question is how no one caught the connotation before the ad ran.
Perhaps it was focus-tested by the same heterogeneous group who, in 2011, gave the thumbs-up to an ad for Nivea for Men in which a cleanshaven black man prepared to hurl a decapitated head bearing an afro. The tagline read: “Re-civilize yourself.” (A second ad featuring a white model ran without the colonial tagline.) The company apologized for the offensive ad, and affirmed its commitment to diversity and equal opportunity.
Whatever backlash these poorly screened campaigns provoked can’t touch the pandemonium unleashed by Pepsi this week. The soda giant’s efforts to harness the youthful energy of protest met swift ridicule.
At the epicentre of mockery is Kendall Jenner, playing a model who walks off the job to join the superchill demonstration, swans over to a cute police officer on the front lines and hands him a can of Pepsi.
Many detected parallels to the iconic photo of protester Ieshia Evans, holding her ground against riot police in Baton Rouge. Twitter was unforgiving. A viral tweet of civil rights-era police beating an African American man with billy clubs was captioned “Kendall please! Give him a Pepsi!” Despite the inferred appropriation of Black Lives Matter, some critics were even more annoyed by the blandness of the protest.
Generic “peace” signs were outnumbered by shots of placards with the quasi-subliminal message “join the conversation,” a common invitation on social media.
Within 24 hours Pepsi withdrew the campaign, acknowledging graciously, “Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue.”
Industry insiders had the last word, noting the soda giant’s in-house ad creation was, itself, the best argument for the benefits of using an ad agency.
For all the negative exposure, Pepsi’s commercial is in much higher demand after being pulled from YouTube. Perhaps all publicity is not good publicity, but when advertisers take a bold risk, it’s part of the calculus.
Diversity in advertising can be a delicate balance — finding inclusiveness without tokenism, and homage without appropriation. People in every target market connect with authenticity.