The spot went up on a Tuesday and was gone by Wednesday. I watched it twice before the takedown and once after, on somebody's reupload.
You know the shape of it. A photogenic march with no demand attached. Signs that say nothing. Kendall Jenner pulls off a wig, hands a police officer a Pepsi, the officer smiles, the crowd cheers, and the thing that was tense is no longer tense.
Almost all the criticism this past week has been about the edit. Wrong casting, wrong moment, nobody senior enough in the room to say no. All true, all beside the point.
Pepsi did not make a tone deaf ad. It made a withdrawal from an account it had never once deposited into, and the spot looked absurd because the balance was zero.
Protest is expensive. That is the entire premise of it. It costs time, safety, employment, and sometimes a great deal more, and every bit of its meaning comes from the cost. An image of a protest with the cost removed is not a hopeful reinterpretation. It is the one thing the image cannot survive.
Compare the brands that walked near this territory and came out standing. Airbnb ran We Accept during the Super Bowl in February, and it worked because Airbnb had a documented discrimination problem, said so publicly, rewrote its own policy, and put real money behind housing people. The ad was a report on something already paid for. Ben & Jerry's has been publishing positions since before most of us were in this business, at the standing cost of some shelf space and a fresh pile of angry mail every single year.
An image of a protest with the cost removed is not a hopeful reinterpretation. It is the one thing the image cannot survive.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. A cultural moment stops being an argument that people are having and becomes a media environment to be entered. The deck says the audience cares deeply about social issues. Nobody asks the follow up, which is what this brand has ever risked on this issue, because the honest answer would end the meeting.
The apology said the brand missed the mark. It did not miss. It hit precisely what it was aiming at, which was the appearance of conviction with none of the exposure, and the audience read that instantly.
By Thursday two different clients had asked me whether their brand should be saying something about the world. The answer is not no. The answer is that you should be able to name, out loud and before you spend a dollar, what you are willing to lose over it. Customers. A retail partner. A quarter. If the answer is nothing, you are not taking a position. You are renting a costume, and the deposit is larger than anyone told you.