Pepsi has pulled its controversial ad suggesting you can solve police brutality with soda

On Tuesday night, Pepsi released a new ad starring Kendall Jenner to the internet. On Wednesday morning, less than 24 hours later, Pepsi pulled the ad from the internet.

But I can only imagine that when Pepsi first signed off on the ad, a scene like this played out:

INT. PepsiCo, Inc. corporate headquarters – office of Ron Draper

Ron picks up a photograph of Don Draper and gazes into Don’s eyes.

RON, whispered: I finally did it, Grandpa. I did it for you. I took your “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” ad and I made it sleazier and more exploitative.

That’s because the ad — which was titled “Jump In,” borrowed heavily from the imagery of the Black Lives Matter movement, and quickly drew vicious backlash on social media — is just the kind of thing Don Draper would love. But it didn’t exactly play well in 2017.

Pepsi eventually realized as much, and issued the following apology:

Pepsi was trying to project global a message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark, and we apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are pulling the content and halting any further rollout. We also apologize for putting Kendall Jenner in this position.

Inexplicably, much of the apology was directed toward Jenner, a grown adult who chose to participate in Pepsi’s campaign of her own free will. But the rest was directed toward the thousands of people who had spent the past few hours savaging Pepsi on social media.

“Jump In” was inexplicably almost three minutes long, making it impossible to play on television during a standard ad break. (The company described it as a short film.) The ad — which has disappeared from Pepsi’s official YouTube channel but remains on Jenner’s — features Jenner modeling in a blonde wig and dark lipstick, which signifies that she is a tool of The Man.

But then: Jenner sees a protest! Its participants are an attractively diverse group of Pepsi-fueled marchers, waving signs that endorse such controversial concepts as “peace” and “togetherness.”

Jenner whips off that blonde wig — she tosses it aside for a black woman to take; said woman looks unimpressed — and wipes away the dark lipstick. Then she magically swaps her high-fashion clothes for an all-denim ensemble, signifying that she is now One of the People.

She’s just joined the marchers when she sees a wall of police officers standing in front of the protest, looking menacing.

Not to worry. Jenner knows what to do. She hands a cop a Pepsi, and guess what? He drinks it.

The protesters go wild. Fist-pumping and cheering all around. A Muslim woman in a hijab snaps a picture to capture the moment the movement worked. Let’s all buy Pepsi.

The backlash was almost immediate.

Twitter is full of memes gleefully mocking the ad. People have fact-checked the idea that politely offering the police refreshment makes them less likely to react violently to a protest. They’ve fact-checked the idea that protests in general — and Black Lives Matter protests in particular — are scenes of lighthearted revelry, dismissing that suggestion despite the cheerfully dancing black men in Pepsi’s imagined protest. They’ve fact-checked the idea that white women are at the center of the Black Lives Matter movement while women of color stay in the background, documenting everything.

In short, people are pissed.

Corporations have a long history of trying to cash in on countercultural movements, and Coca-Cola’s “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” ad is only the most iconic example. If a brand does it right, there’s good money to be made: We tend to use consumer goods as shorthands for our identities, and if a brand can convince a whole social movement that it is their brand, the results can be extremely lucrative. This approach does sometimes work — Verizon got a string of good press in 2014 for its feminist ad campaign, for instance.

But Pepsi’s ad was exceptionally tone deaf. It echoed iconic images from the Black Lives Matter campaign — particularly the famous photo of Iesha Evans facing down a line of cops in riot gear — but it replaced the people of color with a white woman, and the idea of protesting police brutality and systemic racism with the idea that we should all drink more Pepsi.

In contrast, the well-received Verizon ad was structured as a PSA about how important it is to tell girls they’re smart, and then flashed its corporate logo at the end. Make no mistake, Verizon was also co-opting a social movement to try to sell something, just as much as Pepsi is now, but it still preserved the integrity of the movement’s message. Pepsi appropriated the Black Lives Matter movement’s imagery and replaced its message with a can of soda.

Before the ad was pulled, a spokesperson for Pepsi said, “This is a global ad that reflects people from different walks of life coming together in a spirit of harmony, and we think that’s an important message to convey.”

Now that people from all walks of life have come together in a spirit of harmony to hate the ad, the irony of that statement is just important.