How Pepsi Commercial Made BLM Seem Unimportant
The Pepsi Commercial with Kendall Jenner showed her coming from a peaceful protest where she gave a police officer a pepsi where the protesters just cheered up after the officer drank the pepsi. The ad intended to show how pepsi can solve anything, and that you should buy it. But that's not how people felt about it.
If you'd like, you can view the full video on Youtube here:
As you can see by the like and dislike ratio, this is a very controversial ad.
After seeing this ad, I have a wide case of feelings that include disliking the commercial and not caring about it. First of all, the reason why people hated the ad was because it shined the light away from the social justice campaigns and made it seem as unimportant. Though their intention was shining the light towards Pepsi, it seems that they also shined the light away from campaigns like Black Lives Matter at the same time.
It was kind of dumb since they tried to promote their product by showing a police officer drinking a Pepsi where the protesters who were protesting for their cause then suddenly cheer the police officer for drinking the Pepsi which suddenly resolves all the conflict magically. Most people are like "???? What??" because it takes a while for people to realize how strange it is.
After the publication of this ad, the intention of promoting Pepsi ended up the wrong way. But in my opinion, the reason why the Pepsi commercial was so unsuccessful was not because it made the protests seem unimportant, but it was because the ad was bad overall. Pepsi doesn't resolve huge conflicts like those. Only Fruitopia does. (<--- Joke)
But all jokes aside, that's my neutral perspective on the scene. This ad doesn't really affect me nor does it make me feel hatred towards it but.....
That's not what the public felt about it!
They also had mixed feelings for this ad which could go in many ways. To name a few, some people simply disliked Kendall Jenner, some people borderline thought the ad was bad (like me), or some people were involved in these kind of social justice movements and were offended by this. But the vast majority saw this ad negatively since Pepsi wasn't really supporting the social justice movements even though it wasn't Pepsi's true intentions. Pepsi was just trying to promote their product. The ad shined the light off of the social justice movements who were just fighting for what they believe is right (which is a good thing) when Pepsi should have been supporting them and shining the light towards them and not their product which was what made them feel unimportant. The ad could be seen as against the social justice movements due to the lack of attention it had on the ad.
Pepsi should definitely take this into account to be more careful with these kinds of ads. They should aim to please their full audience with diverse ads minimizing the amount of negative feedback. They do indeed deserve the negative feedback but it is only necessary for that to happen for Pepsi to never make the same mistake.
You know you're right about this. Pepsi should've been careful with this ad because they didn't know that the feedback from the audience would be very negative. From the way I see it, some of these brands do not think before they publish first. This is common sense because every brand should be aware that once your advertisement or post is posted up anywhere on social media whether it'd be on youtube or whatever, it will say there. No matter if you delete it or not, someone can still save that video and repost it on their page. Like you said "Pepsi should definitely take this into account to be more careful with these kinds of ads." This is something that should be a no-brainer for all brands if they want to make advertisements. In addition, this ad went in the wrong direction similarly to the Dove ad campaign where people blasted at Dove for that one transition in their advertisement where a black woman transforms into a white woman. This ad campaign that Pepsi made felt like a big slap to BLM's face like why would you do them like that?; making their rights movement seem unimportant? I really hope something like this does not ever happen again. With all these issues and racism and stuff, this is just getting even worse. It's bad enough that we don't have people who actually have thought for other people. I don't care if those creators be like "Oh, we didn't know that it would hurt those types of people". These guys are actually like "oh I don't care about them. Let's just post it anyway. Try and hide some details so that people won't figure it out." Well these people should open their eyes in shame because of how they are thinking about the ad more than the people that will be affected by it.
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ReplyDeleteI definitely understand why people would be confused over this advertisement. They're diverting from important topics that affect people on a deep level and using it to promote their soft drink.
ReplyDeleteNice blog Jeremy, this is well written and easy to digest! Your point of view got across well.
:-)