Five months after pulling its short-lived, tone-deaf commercial featuring reality star and model Kendall Jenner, Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi is still wondering why it backfired.
The two-minute-and-39-second ad, which features Jenner ditching a modeling shoot to join a generic protest, quickly went viral for all the wrong reasons. Shamelessly evoking protest imagery and using plenty of clichéd social media expressions like “join the conversation” and “live for now” to pander to millennials, the ad received five times as many downvotes as upvotes on Youtube in just 48 hours.
Pepsi immediately apologized and admitted that it “missed the mark,” but now it appears that its CEO doesn’t fully agree.
“I’ve thought about it a lot because I looked at the ad again and again and again trying to figure out what went wrong — because it was a peace march not a protest march,” Nooyi told Fortune.
Peace march? Is there even such a thing in today’s world? Every “march” is a protest, and based on its timing, the ad was clearly inspired by the anti-Trump and Black Lives Matter marches that were happening when the video was produced and released.
According to Nooyi, it was more about “people in happiness coming together,” and obviously nothing makes people happier or more unified than a can of Pepsi—other than maybe mocking this ridiculous commercial.
Even Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s daughter, Bernice King, savaged the ad, tweeting, “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi.”
Nooyi also passes the buck on the most controversial scene in the ad. She claims that she had not seen the final scene, during which Jenner gives a Pepsi to a policeman as an olive branch of sorts. This is a bit hard to believe, since this is the climax of the ad’s lackluster storyline.
In any case, she said she pulled the ad because “[Pepsi’s] goal is not to offend anybody.” Diversity is apparently as important to their company as retaining customers.
Nooyi is effectively saying, “sorry, not sorry” to the many protesters who felt belittled by the ad’s portrayal of protests and demonstrations. Millennials are wise enough to see through the celebrity appearances and know when they are being “played” by corporate America. Nooyi’s failed attempted to play dumb only makes matters worse.
