April 5, 2017

Pepsi Has Done Something to Annoy Some People. But Wait! It’s Halley’s Comet!

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The big topic of this particular micro-instant is the new Pepsi ad. What new Pepsi ad? you ask, if you’re completely detached from all the important social memes of modern life. Fine. For you laggards, here’s the ad. It seems to come in different versions, but I think this is the full one:

Over at the Washington Post, Elahe Izadi captures the general reaction to this ad in a piece titled “A second-by-second breakdown of Kendall Jenner’s unspeakably tone-deaf Pepsi ad.” That about sums it up. People are pissed, and I probably don’t need to explain why.

So why did Pepsi do it? Because they don’t really care if people are pissed. They just want attention, and they got it. The very fact that everyone is writing and blogging and tweeting earnestly about how terrible this ad is means it’s done its job. As long as Pepsi can stay just to one side of the Bill O’Reilly line—truly widespread protests that lead to boycotts etc.—this is a win.

Besides, progressives are the only ones who care about this, and in modern America you can count on us forgetting about it pretty quickly because Donald Trump is almost certain to do something soon to distract all. Maybe tomorrow he’ll threaten Xi Jinping that he’s going to bomb Beijing unless China reduces its trade deficit with the US. Or hell, maybe he’ll offer to bomb Taipei if China will take out North Korea for us. Who knows?

UPDATE: I guess Pepsi decided they were getting perilously close to the wrong side of the O’Reilly line. Alternatively, they figured they’d gotten all the attention they were going to, so they might as well kill the ad:

I think Pepsi’s marketing mavens should have paid less attention to this year’s Super Bowl ads and more attention to SNL’s sketch skewering them:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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