I can’t tell if this is funny or if I just recognize what it’s about, but here’s a viral tweet from last week:
This person is reenacting a key moment in a truly deranged Pepsi ad, starring Kendall Jenner. Here’s the relevant clip, though you can also watch the ~three minute cut if you are romantically in love with garbage:
Released in 2017, this whole ad was seen as an attempt to hollow out and commodify the Black Lives Matter movement, because it was. The protesters’ signs are all vaguely pro-peace, but the climactic encounter is between a protester and a cop — which, like the Black Lives Matter movement, foregrounds cop-civilian relations — and the moment Kendall hands the officer a Pepsi also echoes a famous photo from a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge, sparked by a local police officer fatally shooting Alton Sterling.
In the photo, a row of police officers in (I think?) riot gear face off with a woman in a sundress, alone. The woman is Black; the Pepsi ad turns her into a white celebrity. The mood in the photo is a chaotic blend of ominous and inspiring; the Pepsi ad tried to make it… blankly celebratory?
I could talk about how off the ad is is for hours. Every detail is wrong. Even the closing slogan, “Live for Now,” feels like a creepy rebuttal to “Black Lives Matter” — “Don’t worry, you can live. For now!”
The ad got roasted by everyone, including MLK’s daughter, Bernice King.
Pepsi almost immediately pulled it from circulation and apologized, badly. Kendall Jenner also apologized badly six months after the fact, in a monetized way, on an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
I bring this all up because it’s newly relevant. In the current landscape of corporate statements of solidarity with Black people, one brand stands noticeably apart and quiet: Pepsi! As of last night, Pepsi had not said a dang thing since the uprising against police brutality became front-page news and “police abolition” entered the mainstream lexicon. Not on Instagram. Not on Twitter. Not on Facebook. Not on its corporate PR channels.
Meanwhile, Coke’s pinned tweet:
This tweet is average. (It’s right in the text: “it’s just a first step.”) But the lack of a statement from Pepsi — given its recent history, and the fact its main competitor released one — is… frustrating. It feels like the internal takeaway from the 2017 ad was “We need to avoid political issues at all cost” instead of “We need to engage with the substance of political issues and stop treating ‘protest’ as an aesthetic.”
I guess I don’t really know why Pepsi is quiet. Maybe they’re donating with minimal fanfare, like Kanye. (I feel weird praising Kanye but he’s been generous lately!)
Still, the silence strikes me as cowardly and a missed opportunity for the company to actually recover from the ad debacle, instead of just hoping people forget about it — which, as the image at the top of this newsletter shows, no one has. People are getting teargassed and beat up with nightsticks at these protests and still thinking, wow, it’d kill on social if I reenacted that Pepsi ad tho.
With three years of distance, Pepsi could (in theory?) make a better apology for the old ad, actually name what was wrong with it instead of hyping the underlying ~good intentions~, and then talk about how the company has grown and changed to avoid similar errors going forward. (Assuming… something changed? Maybe nothing changed.)
Then they could be like, “We made a mistake in 2017, and we heard your critiques, and we’re sorry in a specific way, and we’re still listening, and we’re committed to fighting racism externally and internally with recurring donations / retooled hiring practices / TBD.”
It could have been a nice, healthy moment, at least by corporate comms standards. But no!
(I recently listened to a great two-part podcast about how to apologize, and I’m just going to drop the link here. It starts slow and hokey but ends STRONG. Especially relevant for: corporations, Kardashians, white people such as myself, andddd boyfriends!)
A certain type of op-ed columnist might argue that Pepsi hasn’t revisited the ad or the entire concept of racism because the company was “silenced” by the original backlash. That’s ridiculous, though; Pepsi has over a million followers on Instagram alone. The company has chosen silence and avoidance, probably because that once was simpler and more “brand-safe” than saying something.
But times have changed a lot in two weeks. Amnesia and blandness and toggling back and forth between pep and silence aren’t safe anymore. Culture has shifted (maybe not enough, but some) towards accountability and acting on your alleged values — for people, but also for the beverage industry.
The minimum acceptable stance is closer to these teas…
… than it is to Pepsi, whose most recent Instagram is more than a week old and feels like it’s from another time on another planet:
So much going on with that very bruise-like thigh tat (??) and those SHOElaces (?!). And yet… so so little.