A Tale Of Two Commercials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73P9STckPLw
This commercial, by any objective standard of measurement, was a complete and utter abomination. It was rightly taken out behind the woodshed and spanked by every critic going.
There were two things any self-respecting advertising person will tell you made this commercial so bad.
Thing One: It tried and failed miserably at capitalizing on the protest movement that is taking place in the US these days.
It did so by taking someone from a perceived privileged position which, which is represented by Mrs Jenner as some sort of supermodel who is bring photographed as this protest is going on virtually right next to her.
This, of course, inspired her to not just take part, but to actually take the lead of an ethnically diverse cluster of protesters, pick up a Pepsi and hand it to one of the riot cops as a gesture of peace, love and groovy. It’s pretty sad.
Thing Two: I did some reading about this commercial and found out that the CEO of Pepsi is very anti-agency, and so created his own little creative army inside Pepsi.
Generally when this sort of thing happens, there is a tendency for people who are not creative, but have power in the company, to ‘meddle’. It’s quite obvious that the meddling that went on here was epic in its scale. And extremely damaging to the brand in its result.
People who are not creative in advertising tend to lack the left brain thinking capacity to really put themselves in the headspace of the consumer and are quite willing to wield a mace at their audience in order to get them to pay attention.
This commercial was pulled after a few days, after massive on and offline protests. The main complaint was that they were trying to capitalize on a movement that was a very serious one in America, and the commercial, besides being nonsensical, was very condescending to the movement they were trying borrow their interest from.
The Heineken Approach
A couple weeks later Heineken, the beer company, which is actually famous for its amazing worldwide advertising, tried the same sort of thing in a very different way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wYXw4K0A3g
The media parasites, always looking for a story to tell, dubbed it, “The Antidote To The Kendall Jenner Pepsi Commercial”.
Of course, it’s not really the antidote to anything, but if these media assholes can get you thinking that it might be, well, it’s better than nothing I suppose.
The Heineken commercial is much more clever and subtle than the Pepsi commercial and that’s the last thing I will say about comparisons.
As you can see from watching it, there is a very concerted attempt to communicate the message that instead of despising people with differing ideologies, we should try listening to them and have them listen to us. And maybe, we will find out that we’re really not so far apart, yadda yadda.
Now it’s easy to be cynical about this idea. But at the same time, in my effort to wean myself off the virulent attacks I have been making on Donald Trump, I’ve been paying particular attention to some of the ‘old school’ journalists like Dan Rather and Ted Koppel.
Believe it or not, a lot of what they are saying these days is pretty much the same sentiment. ie That it’s very important that we start doing less hating and more listening and conversing in a civilized fashion.
Last night on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons (aka Sheldon Cooper) was talking about the same sort of thing. He explained that he reads and listens to all kinds of different points of view on any issue he is interested in, simply because he wants to ‘find out the truth behind the issue'. Not bad advice.
Jim & I Have A Lot In Common Besides Our First Names
I have always maintained that there are a number of sides to every story and in the middle of that construct, lies something, at least close to the truth.
During the process of putting this piece together, I came across an interesting article by a very good writer on Medium whose name is DiDi Delgado. There is a bit of clickbait in the title of this article, but the piece itself is very well reasoned.
I also suggested to her that beBee might be a very good place for her to post as well.
DiDi's Article: https://medium.com/@thedididelgado/the-heineken-ad-is-worse-than-the-pepsi-ad-youre-just-too-stupid-to-know-it-5580e7c40cb1
My Comment on DiDi’ s Article.
This is a very well reasoned piece. And I agree with you that regressive points of view are necessarily given equal footing with progressive points of view.
But I’m not stupid. And I am a long time advertising writer and when you go into the area of opinion with your advertising, you are always going to run into criticism like that which you have leveled here.
The trouble here is that it’s really hard to tell the more important story, which I feel is all about listening to each other, without doing the very thing you are attacking the commercial for.
The Pepsi commercial which I thought was a tragedy of epic proportions, was just phony and obviously written by committee of some sort, because it was done, evidently, by an in-house agency, which means that every suit and his uncle had a say in it and the end product reflects that in spades.
You have every right to feel the way you feel, and so do I, I respect your opinion, and agree with it in great part. But I think that the sponsors were trying to make a human statement and a political one. It’s always going to be a tough row to hoe. I applaud them for the effort. But the more you try and change opinion the more criticism you are going to encounter. Just the way it is.
My Bottom Line
I am all for advertising trying to do the right thing by humanity. The Dove soap brand has been doing it for a couple of years, by featuring real women and doing its part to lessen the pressure on women to live up to an impossible standard.
But this is a world that is almost totally submerged in political correctness, and in order to wake people up, get them thinking and raise their consciousness, you have to break through that barrier.
Sometimes you will fail like Pepsi obviously did. Sometimes you will succeed, as Heineken did (DiDi’s valid points not withstanding).
Either way, none of us should ever stop trying, no matter how we are going about it.
If your business has reached the point where talking to an experienced communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.
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