Kendall Jenner's Pepsi ad

Pepsi has pulled the ad, with an apology for missing the mark. money.cnn.com/2017/04/05/media/pepsi-pulls-kendall-jenner-ad/index.html?sr=twCNN040517pepsi-pulls-kendall-jenner-ad0555PMVODtopLink&linkId=36222456

Cello dude is going to be heartbroken.

I don't think it's nearly as offensive as many of the "what about me?!" virtue signalling trolls in the comments section are making it out to be, but I do agree with Cassandra that it's vacuous, tone deaf, and an all around bad idea.

Marketing at its poorest, imo.

I dislike these types of commercials on principle because I hate this type of emotionally manipulative persuasion strategy being used to sell a brand or product. Coincidentally, I was talking about this with my students just yesterday because they're currently learning about persuasion, obedience, and conformity.

I don't think it's ever appropriate for a company to get political in its ads. If they want to support a political or humanitarian cause, then they can make a donation and send out a press release. But once they couple this type of political/humanitarian cause with the selling of a product, it becomes morally grotesque to me because of its blatant use of emotional manipulation.

I wasn't aware of this ad until I saw this thread, but the example I used in class was that of a commercial from a grocery store chain down here, where the entire commercial was following a soldier (paid actor) coming home from war (and, in these commercials, they somehow always come home unannounced, with no one waiting at the airport to pick them up) and showing up at his parents' house to surprise his family right as they're sitting down to a big family dinner. There's no information about their actual products or services. It's just this "heartwarming" tale of one of America's sons/daughters coming home from war, totally not dead, and their family is so happy they cry, paired up at the end with logo of a shitty store that sells bad produce.

I've seen several companies use these types of ads, especially over the past few years, especially around the holidays, and I find it rather disgusting because they're taking something that is emotionally evocative for many people and pairing it with their brand name in a manipulative attempt to unconsciously get people to associate that warm-fuzzy emotion with their brand.

The Pepsi ad isn't dumb for the same reasons that the "soldiers coming home" ads are. It's dumb for pairing a product with something socially important (the emotional manipulation) but it's also bad because it basically demeans important social movements by portraying that celebrities are the last to realize that there's actual important shit going on in the world, but that nobody cares until the celebrity joins the movement, and that nothing really happens until the celebrity steps forward to lead the movement. That's both not how life actually works and, sadly, pardoxically exactly how life works sometimes.

tl;dr version:

Ads like this are always stupid and tone deaf. Companies should just stop. Either sell a product or be a charity. You can't do both and you especially shouldn't try to do both in the same ad.

Who are these people? I'm not offended, but that advert is just naff. The appropriation of images, the oddly homogeneous multicultural crowd.

It's like Miley Cyrus singing Strange Fruit for an audience of Benetton models.