What Can We Learn From Pepsi's Marketing Mishap?

Pepsi have achieved something very few brands have ever managed to do - they’ve united pretty much the entire ad industry. The feedback is almost unanimous. Wieden+Kennedy tweeted, ‘Is this actually the worst ad of all time?’. And Mother London replied ‘Very possible’. It takes some doing to make an ad that not only the entire agency world agree on, but as far as I can see, the entire world agrees on too. 

Now, believe it not, most people in the industry, (me included), don’t like having a go at other people’s work. This film clearly involved a lot of people’s hard work and time, cost a lot of money, and I’m sure was done with the best intentions. But there are lessons here that everyone can learn from, particularly other brands thinking of doing similar things.

When the question came through to write this article I was asked to answer ‘why something that seems to have obvious creative problems could make it to air’. And in there lies the truth - this is only obvious to people who aren’t too close to notice.

This was made in-house at Pepsi and there clearly weren’t people involved who were empowered to say ‘no’ to what were obviously unwise ideas. The millions of viewers who watched and the 63,786 people who disliked it on Youtube can’t have been the first people to have thought ‘isn’t this, maybe, a bit inappropriate?’ That's why brands have agencies - to give objective, independent (hopefully honest) opinions, but if not, then brands need an internal creative culture where everyone is free to be the 'canary in the mine'.

Unfortunately, and I mean this genuinely, it’s almost a step-by-step guide of what not to do. You can see the thought process, Black Lives Matters is a big thing, it’s ‘a young people thing’, shall we do something with that? No, you’re a soft drink. If brands are determined to do something with charities or causes they need to put the cause or charity first - help them, do it genuinely for them, and not for themselves. BLM is a serious cause affecting millions of people’s lives. It’s not something to be crudely re-appropriated to sell more cans of fizzy drink. Let’s not even get in to the fact that there are hardly any actual black people at this Black Lives Matter march (sorry, I mean generic non-threatening protest that looks suspiciously like it was inspired by a BLM protest). You know you're doing something wrong when Martin Luther King's daughter tweets 'If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi'.

If anything good can come out of this it’s that hopefully other brands can learn from it and not make the same mistakes. And just as an aside, you know that thing where a brand makes everything in the frame reflect the colours of the brand…? So, every object in the frame is either Pepsi red or Pepsi blue…. It’s a really bad idea, the consumer knows the trick and it makes the brand look cheap and under-confident. You can have that tip for free.