The adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” will be tested to the Pepsi Max today, after the soft drinks giant hastily pulled its controversial “protest” ad starring Kendall Jenner.
Undeniably, Jenner’s Disneyfied civil rights protest – featuring buffed, hot movie extras from all core millennial demographics – was ludicrous. But was it offensive?
Initially, Pepsi stuck to their guns, saying: “We think that it’s an important message to convey.”
Some early responses to the ad were funny, as pranksters quickly Photoshopped a can of Pepsi stopping the tanks in Tiananmen Square.
But when Black Lives Matter supporters weighed in, claiming that the brand had trivialized police brutality, the ad lost its fizz.
When Martin Luther King’s daughter, Bernice, tweeted “if only daddy had known about the power of #Pepsi” the brand panicked.
Some 1.3 million tweets later (making it bigger news than war crimes in Syria) Pepsi yanked the much-mocked ad, and issued a groveling apology.
Only time will tell if Pepsi sales go flat among the offended communities.
The “FFS, get a life!” brigade might buy more Pepsi. The residual meme – that a can of Pepsi can avert any disaster – could be as big as Harambe.
But I don’t believe the ad was an accident. Pepsi’s troll was clumsy, but deliberate. Because these days, nothing sells like deliberately whipped-up outrage.
This deliberately trolly state, where rage is used to generate engagement has already been dubbed “engragement”.
It’s everywhere. This week alone in the UK, there has been a brand-related outrage every single day.
On Monday, chocolatiers Cadbury were accused of “airbrushing faith” when they removed the word Easter from some of their National Trust Egg Hunt literature.
Even the Prime Minister got involved, calling it “frankly ridiculous” – which it was, as the PM didn’t realise this too was an overblown storm in a teacup.
Purely by chance, my children had taken part in a Cadbury egg hunt the day before, where “Easter” was displayed in letters bigger than their heads.
But people didn’t want the truth: they wanted to be outraged. They wanted to shriek about boycotts, “political correctness gone mad” or, preposterously, “creeping Sharia law”. Over chocolate!
On Tuesday, Topshop was accused of – yawn – “cultural appropriation” when Tweeters pointed out a “festival-ready scarf playsuit” looked like a Palestinian keffiyeh, a symbol of “hardship and bloodshed”.
One bleated “not cool Top Shop” – but it promptly sold out online. Like Pepsi, was Top Shop’s flirt with protest chic deliberate?
Yesterday, the Co-Op supermarket was under the cosh for a “misogynistic” Easter Egg advert that read “treat your daughter for doing the washing up”.
The brand hastily changed the ad, but was allowed to extol its “proud tradition of equality” on the BBC website, a PR win overall.
Of course, some of these are accidents.
But there are too many of them to be pure coincidence. Some brands are masters of trollenomics – this trolling-for-profit – with the Daily Mail being undisputed heavyweight champions.
Last week, its front page #Legsit article – comparing the assets of Prime Minister Teresa May and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon – dominated British media for 48 hours.
It was a masterclass in agenda-setting tabloid journalism. It topped UK Twitter trends all day. Hot-takes on Legsit were most-read pieces on the Guardian, Independent and the BBC. The entire nation had been trolled.
On BBC radio, I told an apoplectic female politician: “We’re all being played like trumpets by The Mail”.
Her voice wobbling with indignation, she countered, “I don’t think the Daily Mail are that intelligent”. But she’s wrong, and they don’t just do it for the LOLs. They do it for the profit garnered from every click to their sidebar of shame, and every Tweet that amplifies their brand.
This world serves up scandal from the likes of Pepsi and Protein World (of “beach body ready” fame) – and there will be endless others.
This same world gives us outright troll brands like Katie Hopkins, Milo Yiannopoulos and wall-to-wall Donald Trump, especially on the news networks that hate them.
Because righteous, indignant anger sells, and everyone wins – creators and haters – in the ratings and clickbait frenzy.
The Guardian – struggling so much it now shakes a virtual begging bowl at the foot of every online article – should thank Pepsi, the Daily Mail, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson or whoever today’s bogeyman is. In purely financial terms, the liberal media needs its antichrists.
That’s fuelled by their readers’ daily need to vent their anger. Liberals could probably make Katie Hopkins go away if they ignored her. But their addiction to virtue signalling means they can’t.
That’s why you can guarantee the liberal media will inexorably rage against “racist” Pepsi, or “sexist” Easter Eggs, because their analytics department tells them it gets traffic.
And, increasingly, canny brands will be in on the troll, because they all know: hate sells, and everyone’s buying.