From Blog & Mablog:
I have been trying to wrap my head around the supreme awfulness of the Pepsi protest ad, which was—to be brief—corporate America’s idea of what it means to Stick it to the Man. For those of you just emerging from a deep cavern somewhere, the ad is somewhere below. Don’t blame me. I am just the messenger. Don’t shoot the messenger.
The ad has drawn fire from every quarter—left, right and center, and so the reasons for the gag reflex vary. Pepsi pulled the ad and apologized. Of course they did. To be expected. But let me try to explain why I think it was such an atrocity. I would sum it up by pointing out that all the feminists in the ad were good looking.
Now before you react and say that this is just an outrage clickbait stunt (on my part), there is far more to it than that. The point, deep and substantive, is far larger. It is the same problem as when you have a punk rocker, as ratty and raggedy as all get out, everything disheveled, except for the perfection of the orthodontic work. I mean, we are talking about teeth that were laid out with a surveyor’s line, and they have that little star sparkle that some toothpaste commercials still use. In actual protests, we have landfill worthy amounts of garbage, and renegade protesters defecating on cop cars, not sexy models flashing gang signs. This ad was about as revolutionary as The Brady Bunch.
In other words, corporate America has a tin ear for what passes for authenticity these days. But we have three layers here. We have actual authenticity, rarely observed anywhere by anybody, we have the faux authenticity of actual squalor accidentally on purpose, and then we have the faux faux authenticity of reality star models tearing off their wigs to strut their stuff down to the riot police line, at which point they give a sample of The Product® to a cop who is just as good-looking as that intense cellist (yea, verily, yea), and who might be just as good in bed, no telling yet.
So the revolution is phony, largely made up of a bunch of angsty white kids whose parents are ad execs. But the signals have been agreed upon across our culture, and so everybody involved gets a pass. We all have agreed to not notice that our agitprop stunts are all commodified for the cameras, and so everybody knows how to make this Rousseau Farce look more or less realistic. Everybody except for Pepsi, that is.
We have hair product to make it look like you haven’t washed your hair in days. Twenty dollars a tube, and everybody should have gotten the memo. And then Pepsi (Pepsi!) makes an ad that wants to make a carbonated soft drink an emblem of the revolution. I mean Ben & Jerry’s was pushing it (ice cream?). The way to monetize this thing would have been with Che! T-shirts. Everybody would have stayed in their seats for that at any rate.