Last week’s Pepsi TV campaign was excruciating.
How does such creative work get signed off? How does an agency’s entire 8-year strategy of socially engineering America to buy more sugary soda conclude with Kendall Jenner defusing a Tiananmen Square-moment with a can of Pepsi? We would have peace in the world if Kendall Jenner handed ISIS a Pepsi?
Strategic-takeaway: don’t mix advertising with politics. Very few brands can pull this off. Pepsi has zero history of promoting social justice causes.
Unless you have long-earned the right to be in that territory, don’t bother trying to force-fit your product into it.
