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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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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