Guitars strumming. Various people from different ethnic backgrounds cheering peacefully. Kendall Jenner walking up the street holding a can of Pepsi and offering it to a cop, conveniently missing his riot gear.
That’s apparently what Pepsi would like you to think protests are like as long as it sells a can of their product. As we’ve seen in past reports, protests can get pretty nasty, pretty quick.
But somehow, Pepsi approved a commercial that’s basically a long music video about how uplifting protests are.
How this was approved by anyone without a single objection is baffling. It’s pissed off everyone from the furthest right to the furthest left.
No one’s happy with how protests are being commercialized into a corporate virtue signal.
Publishing it to YouTube, a platform PepsiCo recently boycotted by removing its ads, the new commercial is being flayed on social media on all sides of the political spectrum. The criticism towards the company has been savage.
Black Lives Matter’s Deray McKesson wrote: “this ad is trash.”
Mike Cernovich, the darling of the alt-right, echoed Deray’s remarks. “This is everything wrong about the world, you couldn’t script better satire,” he tweeted.
“I want to thank Pepsi for showing us what a protest would look like if it were focus-grouped by a billion-dollar corporation first,” chimed in The Daily Beast’s resident feminist Samantha Allen.
Some critics highlighted the ad’s similarities to an iconic photo of Black Lives Matter protester Ieshia Evans during her arrest in Baton Rouge.
Commodification of social justice aside, the Pepsi ad sanitizes protests—gritty affairs that often carry the threat of violence for all its participants, including the police.
With its culturally diverse cast, Kumbaya-by-the-campfire messaging and a “hip” celebrity famous only for her Instagram photos, PepsiCo could not have produced a more contrived ad.
A senile Don Draper, having lost the bulk of his mind, must’ve written it. In the end, the revolution will be commercialized.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.