You guys have all watched this clip. Even if you don’t have cable, you streamed it and clicked “share” or debated it on r/advertising and did all those other things that send any campaign’s KPIs through the roof.
But we’re gonna post it again because SNL finally did a decent skit, and it will hopefully serve as the last word on the Kendall Cola Scandal of 2017.
A couple of things.
This was almost certainly not the vision of any one person among the many now debating whether to scrub “Creators League” from their LinkedIn profiles. We all know this kind of stuff takes a committee what with the approvals and the casting and the post-production.
What’s that saying about how you’ve already lost the argument if you feel the need to defend yourself?
Re: our headline, the Pepsi ad we deserve (with “we” meaning the ad industry, the U.S. and the world at large) was exactly the one we got, because we are very shallow and preoccupied and happy just to find someone to hate for a week or so.
On that note, we got a pitch for a guest post today from some guy arguing that the campaign was actually quite successful, HATERS, because it simply held up a mirror to our own desires and projections. We worship celebrities, young people, and “diversity” as an abstract rather than a real-world practice. We are quick to turn anything into a hashtag and claim it as part of our own identities (do NOT say “personal brands”) when, in fact, the vast majority of us have little or no idea what the hell we’re going on about.
Can retweets equal “cultural appropriation”? Could Pepsi have avoided all this by just sticking with its outside agency partners? We do not know. But we look forward to avoiding all future think pieces about this ad.
Now … does this reddit user really think that any of the creatives who led the Jenner project will actually speak to him/her on the topic of “I AM SEEKING ANYONE WHO WAS INVOLVED WITH CREATING THE WORST/BEST AD OF EVER?”
Today we learned the phrase “the Tommy Wiseau of advertising,” and we are not a bit smarter for it.