Daily Times

If you surf the internet regularly, you would not have missed the controversy relating to Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner ad. Pepsi duly pulled it within days but not before setting the internet ablaze. As a professor of marketing, I cannot recall the internet coalescing around any one ad with such unanimity, alacrity, gusto, and venom. At the same time, the Pepsi-Jenner ad goes to the very heart of advertising, raising troublesome questions: What went wrong? And, are there limits to advertising?

But first let’s quickly recall the Kendall ad. A lissome supermodel, in the middle of a modelling gig, gets intrigued by protest noise. Egged by the egalitarian wink of a cellist, she doffs her blond wig and weaves her way through a mob. A police team comprising only white men are in a visibly fearsome mood. Kendall zeroes in on an uber-handsome but truculent police officer and dares him with a Pepsi can. The music stops. He ponders, accepts, and quaffs, rolling his lips into arcs of seduction. The party begins.

The party also managed to whip up an unparalleled frenzy on the internet. Livid social-media critics have fired angry broadsides at the ad, calling it “tone-deaf” for sublimating the uglier side of race-relations in the US. Some are enraged because the ad-protest seems non-descript, jejune, and sanctimonious. Others have taken umbrage at the perceived slighting of the iconic leshia Evans. No less a person than the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. quipped, “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi”.

To understand the internet vitriol, we need to look back at advertising history and ask: Why advertise? Companies do it for two reasons: inform and persuade. You need to inform consumers about the attributes and benefits of your products. But this is not enough: You also need to persuade them to buy it repeatedly. Positioning is key. Most medicines that fight a normal cold, over the last 50 years, still have the same three ingridients — they’re analgesic, antihistamine, and decongestant. But you can position ads about them around either a single condition (cold, sinus, and allergy) or symptom (running nose and eyes and headache), or around multiple conditions or symptoms. There are many choices.

Sadly, the competition copies every claim you make. And the consumer becomes more jaded. In the end, they know it is just an ad. Functional ads work less and less. It is time for emotional and self-expressive advertisements. Take water for example. It is not merely a mineral (functional), but also a symbol of purity (emotional) and vanity (self-expressive), to be held in your hand like a Louis Vuitton bag. Symbolism is key. Recall the opening scene from Bollywood movie “Rab Nay Bana Di Jori” that’s set at the Golden Temple — the temple foretells there will be divine intervention. Similarly, one can refer to SRK’s symbolic masterpiece “Paheli”. Without symbols there is neither a work of art nor a good ad.

Alas, even this is not enough. The consumers finally fathom you are nothing but a money-making corporate machine, representing main-stream corporate values. They believed you that by smoking Marlboro they would turn into the Marlboro cowboy, temporarily getting rid of their worries. Nothing happened. What do you do? You ratchet up the risk by one more notch by making fun of the advertising game itself. You reclaim authenticity.

Take Diesel. In the late 1990s, the Diesel jeans were selling at around Euro 50. Then came the riveting series of iconic Diesel ads, which made fun of mainstream culture. Young, affluent, and intelligent consumers fell for the ads. The price of a Diesel jeans reached Euro 250 within a few years. Mountain Dew did it equally perfectly. Pepsi bought it in 1964 and launched creative ads to ride wave upon wave of counter-culture. Just like Diesel the ads catapulted Mountain Dew into the top three fizzy drinks around the globe.

So why did the counter-culture Pepsi-Kendall ad go down as one of the most controversial ads in recent history? Personally, I find the ad well-made. Ads are not meant to depict reality. I even think that internet has given it the kind of publicity it would never have received even by spending hundreds of millions of ad dollars by running it on prime-time TV. Remember the cost of making an ad is a fraction of the cost of running it on TV.

My explanation is at least two-fold. One, many are put off by the mere presence of the ersatz Kendall — the ultimate antithesis of authenticity that the ad was seeking. More important is the timing of the ad. In the 1960s, race relations in the US were far worse than they are today. But ironically the hope that they would eventually get better was stronger. The 1971 Coke ad became an icon. In 2017, these hopes have been dashed as much by the persistence of bigotry and police brutality as by the right-wing renaissance in the US. The Pepsi ad came just at a time when the sceptics are not only pessimistic but also more vocal in the social media space.

Advertising fulfils one of the deepest needs of human beings — to be informed and persuaded. However, all creativity bears risk and this will provide the internet with enough room to test the mettle of the sharpest ad-makers. Equally, marketers and brand managers must accept that they are not the sole proprietors of the brand. The internet will bite them hard when they overstep the turf they themselves create. Therein lies both the irony and promise of branding and advertising.

The author is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Management at the Lahore School of Economics. He is a regular contributor to Daily Times