Will the shaming of Pepsi just help them sell more soda?
DID the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial work? Put it this way, last Tuesday, when news was emerging of the chemical attack in Syria that has killed over 80 people, for a while it was Pepsi that was trending in the number one spot on Twitter in the United States.
If you didn’t see it, the ad showed Jenner, a white, wealthy member of the Kardashian family, posing for a fashion shoot.
Noticing a passing demonstration, she pulls off her blonde wig, joins the activists, picks up a can of Pepsi and, in the final shots, passes the drink to a watching cop in the riot police line, before Pepsi delivers the line: “Live For Now.”
Almost from the moment the ad was released, people were talking about it, tweeting about it, castigating it for trivialising US street protests then sharing articles in which the video was embedded. All of which has only served to spread the advert’s reach – even after the company pulled the ad, stating: “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark, and we apologise. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue.”
There were plenty of things wrong with this commercial, but the main outrage concerned that final image, which for many strongly echoed a powerful photograph of Ieshia Evans at the Black Lives Matter Baton Rouge protest last July, calmly standing as Louisiana state riot troopers rush towards her, prior to her arrest. The Pepsi shot seemed to call up that iconic image, while treating it lightly and dismissively. The advert triggered a mostly ragefuelled Twitter meme. Martin Luther King’s daughter posted a picture of her father being held back by police, with the words: “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi.”
We might like to think the time in which all publicity is good publicity is over, but shame, over social media, is an increasingly powerful driver of fame and attention. And PepsiCo was thoroughly shamed. Hence, for much of this last week of outrage, a lot of people were looking at Jenner with her Pepsi can. The advert’s director of photography insisted the inspiration wasn’t Ieshia Evans, but a 1967 image of a protester handing police a flower in the Vietnam war era. But either the team involved in making and passing the advert hadn’t been diverse enough to recognise the similarity, or they’d thought it didn’t matter.
Pepsi was co-opting a movement, just as many advertisers have since Coca-Cola first taught “the world to sing” with its hippies on the hill. But for many, what rankled was that despite using the style of contemporary protest, the Pepsi ad avoided pinning its colours to the mast of any particular cause – as if scared of creating anything too divisive.
PepsiCo’s pulling of the advert was viewed as a triumph for Black Lives Matters. But it was also a triumph for PepsiCo. As I write, the advert can still be found on countless news sites. When I open my Twitter account, there Kendall Jenner is, again and again. Yes, the company has issued an apology and news articles tell us Jenner is “devastated”. But how bothered can Pepsi be? Here we have a brand which has, in this moment, managed to gain more attention than its rival, Coca-Cola. It seems to me PepsiCo could afford to pull the ad because it had already done its job.
Pepsi may have lost some customers – but I suspect most of the people who would be properly offended by this advert probably weren’t buying the product anyway. Some because they were anti-capitalist. Others, perhaps, because the company’s 2013 advert for its drink Mountain Dew, which featured a goat as a black gang member, was pulled after being described by social commentator Boyce D Watkins as “arguably the most racist commercial in history”.
Corporations aren’t really interested in the content of social movements. They’re happy to co-opt activist style, to surf on whatever cause might bring them the most allure, but their ultimate aim is sales. Was the Jenner advert trying to court activists? Or attempting to win back Trump supporters estranged by the politics of PepsiCo’s chief executive Indra Nooyi, a backer of Hillary Clinton who, when Trump won, said she was in mourning and earned a boycott from his supporters. (PepsiCo is now on the Trump advisory board.)
I suspect it’s neither – or either. The core aim of all ads is to gain attention, and this one succeeded. That capitalism does this – eats up every cause, spits them out and makes them into mainstream profit – is nothing new. But the instantaneous nature of digital technology means the cycle is happening faster. Dissent begins to gather and moments later it’s commodified. “Live for now”, says the Pepsi advert. But it could also come with the warning: “For, by tomorrow, Pepsi will be using your rebellion to sell soda.”