Pepsi will fizzle out as worst ad ever

Suzanne Harrington pipes in on the debate surrounding that Pepsi ad.

Pepsi, were you coked up? Imagine the scene.

A bunch of expensively educated ‘creatives’ — and yes, those apostrophes denote sarcasm — are sitting in a playroom, sorry, boardroom, surrounded by wacky zany props like juke boxes and bean bags to encourage ‘creativity’ — and yes, those apostrophes are still sarcastic— when one of them pipes up, “I know, let’s get someone rich , white and privileged, and put them in a protest march, you know, like those zeitgeisty Black Lives Matter things, with lots of product placement. Genius!”

And so this is exactly what they did.

Clang! Gasp! Biff!

That was the sound of a cultural lead balloon hitting the ground, followed by a collective intake of horrified Pepsi executive breath, and a marketing team being bounced off the nearest wall by their ankles. Because yes, it was Pepsi’s in-house team whodunnit — they couldn’t even blame an external ad agency for the worst ad in the history of humankind.

To recap— Pepsi thought it would be super smart and on trend to make an advert featuring a protest march. You know, now that everything in our world is hellbound in a rightwing handcart, why not sell some cola off the back of it?

So they hired a relative of the Kardashian narcissocracy, and paid her to pretend to walk out of a fashion shoot to join in a Disneyfied pretend protest march, where everyone is wearing Pepsi-blue colours, waving banners with the words ‘peace’ and ‘love’, and dancing like they were at Glastonbury.

Princess Selfie gives a cop a can of fizzy drink, to fist bumps, smiles and cheers from the young, clean, well dressed, jolly crowd. No one gets shot.

Pepsi, have you ever been on a protest march? Of course you haven’t. The people who go on protest marches do so because they are Very Cross Indeed about whatever outrage is currently occurring, so much so that they have bothered to leave the house, make witty banners, converge in a public place, and risk getting arrested or Dr Pepper sprayed for their trouble. Sorry. The Dr Pepper reference was inevitable.

What protestors do not do is flow down the street smiling and sporting co-ordinating leisurewear. That’s a Benetton advert. Real life protestors are angry, sweary, focused, politicised and determined. And scruffy. They are there for a reason, and that reason is not to give someone who looks like a traffic cop a can of pop.

Anyway, cops at protest marches tend to sit on top of giant horses that wear visors and shin-pads — the horses, not the cops — and are trained to charge into crowds. On the ground, they wear Judge Dredd riot gear, phalanxed like Roman soldiers. They favour tear gas in France, bullets in America, and kettling in Britain — we’ve all seen the footage.

I’ve yet to see riot cops enjoying a fizzy drink break in between bashing people over the head. Pepsi, go home, you massive eejits.