No sooner had Pepsi skooshed open its latest ad campaign, the internet burped it back up. The soft drink giant’s new commercial features Kendall Jenner (ask a young person) emerging from a crowd of protestors to offer a can of Pepsi to an officer on a police line. The advert is more sugary than the fizzy beverage it hawks. A parade of suspiciously attractive demonstrators march through the streets of a US city, powered only by air punches and smugness.
Their cause is unclear — but the placards bear such subversive slogans as ‘Join the conversation’. A confrontation with the least intimidating cops this side of a Keystone silent is mercifully averted when Jenner shows up and charms an amenable bobby with a can of pop. Everyone does the ‘rock on’ fingers, and society’s ills are laughed out of existence. Safe to say the surviving members of the Chicago Seven needn’t worry about their legacy being overshadowed.
But outrage culture being what it is, the internet couldn’t settle for deriding Pepsi’s vanilla activism.
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