The Pepsi Generation
In which we venture to imagine how the hell this happened.
My answer to a commenter in the New York Times who was offended that Black people were offended by this ad and could not for the life of him understand why:
The problem with this ad is that there is total cognitive dissonance between the situation it depicts, some sort of defanged political protest, with the product it shills, which is sugary brown water with bubbles. So even if you cannot possibly conceive how some people may think that this idiotic ad trivializes history, the ad is a disaster because a Pepsi cannot ever do what the ad claims it can. A Pepsi cannot have a starring role in a political protest unless it’s a molotov cocktail…
The ad is completely divorced from reality. It’s the idiotic trivialization of our moment in time, in which people are compelled to protest about seriously important issues. Its inappropriate borrowing of civil rights imagery also trivializes a very serious fight for justice that still continues. This tweet from the daughter of Martin Luther King about sums it up:
Yet the marketing geniuses at Pepsi, in their world of consumer research and data points and whatnot…
