Millennials: Pepsi thinks you’re an ignorant, self-absorbed bunch of SJWs.

 By now you’ve probably seen the Pepsi ad featuring a unit of the world’s most iconic duo. On first watch – especially when you’ve got a couple of glasses of cheap beverage mixed with Coke in you – it seems like the usual corporate advertising guff.

There’s a hundred or so attractive young people (and a few attractive token older people) attending some kind of big-city street festival with a backing track of reggae-lite and unlikely loud cheering – given that the size of the crowd is frankly not as impressive as you’d expect with Pepsi’s marketing budget.

This was a slightly bigger crowd. Beer ad though, not soft drinks, so the noise was justified.

There’s a young Asian man; who with some serious dedication to his art has dragged a cello up onto the roof of an apartment block to play it in a rainstorm, then manhandled the busted and waterlogged thing back the fuck down to the street to play at the festival. There’s a young woman in a hijab who can’t seem to find the right photo, and ragequits her project to shoot, er, take photos on the street instead. Seriously, could the racial stereotypes be more laboured? Asian man driven to be a prodigy but is a “real artist” instead, Muslim woman with a career as a hardbitten freelance photojournalist.

There’s basic white bitches pulling selfie faces, leering drag queens (or are they basic middle-aged bitches? Can’t tell), black men doing hip-hop dancing, a white guy with a guitar – all the tick-the-boxes tropes we know and ignore.  A model, that Kardashian with no ass – not the ugly one – abandons her fashion editorial photoshoot, which would break contract and probably cost her the fee and a lawsuit and be all kinds of rebellious, if she was JUST a model. She runs off at a signal from the hottie Asian, because fuck career responsibilities when random hotties nod at you in the street, amirite girls? She uses her superpowers to blowdry her wig-flattened hair and don a hideous denim mom-jeans ensemble in nanoseconds, then joins the street festival.

‘Member denim? I ‘member.

Fine, whatever, you think; as you take another gulp and idly contemplate how Coke is like unto the ambrosia of the gods mixed with cheap bourbon, whereas Pepsi just doesn’t manage to cut the base flavors of battery acid and kerosene. Festivals are good. Fuck, you need to go to a street festival again. That last one didn’t really go according to plan, after you drunkenly told that girl she looked like Eleven from Stranger Things (turned out she had chemo and didn’t watch Stranger Things, so you tried to explain the series and it just got awkward as shit). You started pub-crawling and drinking shots up and down the road to kill the embarrassment – then, much later, you threw up on some Goth’s boots in a bathroom queue. Not cool, man. You must redeem yourself!

Hang on. Is this is supposed to be a protest march? There are cops. Cops don’t normally line up all mean-looking like that if it’s just a festival. They’re not in full riot gear though, so it can’t be that serious. What the hell is going on? Hey, that Kardashian just grabbed someone else’s Pepsi from their convenient tub in the middle of the street  – the fucking entitlement! She’s sashaying up to a cop in those 80s jeans only your gran and fashionistas wear, handing the can to him with the most limp-wristed motion you’ve ever seen, besides that video of the guy with the recent arm transplant picking up a glass while the doctors act all nervous and expectant.

The limp wrist must be a defensive move on her part, because most people at a protest wearing all-denim and thrusting something at a dour-faced cop at point-blank range are probably not going home that day, if ever. But wait! The officer drinks the Pepsi, apparently not concerned that it may be tampered with. The Kardashian floats back into the crowd to a huge cheer – like, a soccer crowd cheer, not from the few dozen people in the ad. She must feel tremendously important. People are hugging each other. Some kind of victory has just happened. What the fuck is going on?

Hey, cool. Share on Facebook! Wait, that isn’t what happened.

This happened: people don’t like this advert; because it’s a protest-lite, with all the pretty racially-diverse people marching for some kind of cutesy non-issue like “Flowers not Fascists” or something. Everyone is uniting happily under the watchful but benign eyes of law enforcement. Life is simple and sweet and all we need to do is offer a soft drink to someone with a few months of firearms training who’s nervous in crowds! Congratulations all around, we’ve just solved the problem of world peace!

The backlash on social media commenced immediately, with people comparing the imagery to a picture of nurse Ieshia Evans calmly standing in front of riot cops at the Baton Rouge protests that followed the point-blank shooting of a restrained man – getting her cuffs on.

Uncontested winner of the epic stare-down. Okay, except for that Tiananmen Square guy. 

Various Internet meme factories started producing and sharing images of police violence towards protestors, with Pepsi thrown into the mix – like the UC Davis Occupy protestors pepper spray incident.

Ugh! It went right in my mouth!

This photo of the 1964 civil rights protest marches also got the Pepsi meme treatment.

Alabama’s a Grapico state. These are some brave folks.

Then the daughter of Martin Luther King chipped in with a low-key but nonetheless searing tweet about MLK’s equality protests in the 60s.

Well…fuck.

 Users of Black People Twitter on Reddit quickly went savage on Pepsi’s sanitized version of social activism; in which protests are fun parties and not attempts to salvage democracy in increasingly volatile, racially-divided developed countries.

u/R2B7S: Protesting is hip and fun! Have a Pepsi!

 Basically, anyone with a shred of political savvy hit back at the corporate suits – who tried to strain serious activism through a sieve of “young adults are only semi-aware of ‘issues’, and are mostly concerned with their perceived identities, which we gleaned from reality TV and Instagram”  and tapped something they didn’t expect.

Shit quickly got real for Pepsi and they realized the error of their w…er, they realized the drastic potential impact on their margins from their target market, so they pulled the ad and released this kinda half-assed apology:

But…politics is about parties, right?

If you’re the kind of person who watched the ad a couple of times and didn’t AT LEAST think it was ignorant and lame, but went all “Oh hey that’s pretty cool, why can’t we all just be friends and stuff?! #unity #worldpeace” or whatever, then you might be beyond any kind of redemption that actual knowledge of history or current world events can give you.

Kendall Jenner was last seen leaving a swanky nightclub with her hands over her face like she’d just been teargassed by an overzealous riot cop.

Fuck you, paparazzi, my hoody doesn’t say “Mein Kampf”.

I’ve never touched Pepsi, but now I’m sort of curious, so I guess…they win? Lessons learned all round.