Epic fail by the PepsiCo numpties
It’s less than an hour by train and metro from Purchase, the Westchester County, New York State HQ of PepsiCo, to the Bronx or Harlem.
But, judging by PepsiCo’s epic fail with its latest Mountain Dew ad campaign, it might as well be a million miles or a different planetary system.
Anybody familiar with Mountain Dew advertising knows that it normally features white frat boys doing oh-so-crazy-daredevil stunts and going ‘wooh-hooh’ to some indie-grunge soundtrack.
Result: inner city urbanites, largely non-white, like the residents of the Bronx, don’t drink the stuff.
Solution: a contract, via the William Morris talent agency, with black rapper and comedian Tyler the Creator (new to me too) to create some edgy YouTube ads featuring a Mountain Dew-obsessed thieving goat called Felicia and a suspect line-up of stereotypical black youths.
Big problem: the ads are branded ‘arguably the most racist ever’ by a black academic, Dr Boyce Watkins, and immediately pulled off air by an embarrassed PepsiCo, who then tweeted using the #fail – which at least seems to show some self-awareness, and maybe a little humour too.
The question is how do such things happen? How can a savvy corporation like PepsiCo get it so wrong?
Well, we’ve all been in the room when what subsequently proves to be a bad idea takes hold and, before you know it, has taken off and no-one dares question it and then it’s too late because too many individuals have too much invested in it.
But something is clearly wrong with the structure of PepsiCo/Mountain Dew’s marketing team. Some tough questions need to be asked. 1) Did anyone check out what Tyler the Creator stands for? 2) What approval process or checks and balances existed? 3) Does anyone in the Mountain Dew marketing department – at least with any authority – represent or at least understand the ethnic urban demographic? 4) And why did no-one in PepsiCo stand up to Tyler?
Only PepsiCo will know the answer to all these questions, but I suspect that at the root of it all lies PepsiCo’s ignorance of this ethnic urban target market. That’s why they didn’t check out what Tyler stood for. They were so in awe of the ‘talent’ that they gave Tyler free rein. And no-one in PepsiCo either knew they were going wrong and had the authority to say so, or had the the clout to be heard – in other words, to speak truth unto power.
Now it’s not my job to defend ad agencies, but this looks to have bypassed one altogether. And it reminds us why they’re important: one, they would have better understood the target market; two, they work with ‘talent’ all the time, and they know how to control it; three, they have proper approval processes; and four, they can speak truth unto power.
There are a couple of other lessons too. First, the days when you can use digital media as a testing ground, are gone. It’s too public. And second, marketing needs diversity. Greg Dyke once described the BBC as ‘hideously white and middle-class’. Well, that’s the danger of being based in Purchase, Westchester County.
P.S. Don’t you just love the use of the word ‘arguably’ in the description of the ad as the most racist ever? I’m sure there are worse out there, but all media coverage of Mountain Dew dropped the ‘arguably’ word. Try this website if you want some more outrage.
P.P.S. Apart from an ad for Trident chewing gum a few years ago in which a bunch of Caribbeans chanted ‘mastication for the nation’ in patois – and which was rightly banned as racist – the UK seems pretty free of racist advertising.
TV’s Mark Twain moment
Mark Twain famously said that reports of his death were exaggerated after a New York newspaper claimed he was dead and if TV could speak, it might say the same after Google chairman Eric Schmidt described the medium as ‘already over’.
Talking to advertisers in New York last week, Schmidt used the fact that YouTube had hit the 1 billion unique users a month mark to fire a shot at TV.
Well, yes, we all know YouTube is huge and bulking up continuously. And no doubt Google’s plans to add more professional content from established content makers will accelerate the trend.
But what’s really going on here is the start of a land grab for more advertising revenue. It won’t be long before we will hear Google say that because ‘YouTube commands X per cent of viewing time it should get X per cent of ad revenue’. We’re now hearing this almost weekly with mobile.
I wish people would stop this simplistic nonsense. The sense of entitlement grates.
Life, and certainly ad budgets, don’t work like this for YouTube, mobile or other media. It reminds me of that piece of graffiti: ‘eat shit – a million flies can’t be wrong.’
There’s a lot more to allocating ad budgets than just eyeballs – impact, engagement, response and so on. Before any medium can increase its share of ad revenue it has to prove itself. And that’s what YouTube – and mobile – have to do before things change.
Cockroach lives to fight another day
A couple of weeks ago, I described tobacco companies as the cockroaches of advertising because of the way, however hard governments and lobby groups stamped on their marketing activities, they just couldn’t kill them off.
And so it proves, with news last week that the government’s plan to force them to adopt plain packaging – thus denying them their last vestiges of branding – has been shelved.
Big tobacco’s advertising against plain packaging – which ridiculed the DoH’s ignorance about its effect on consumption – may have played a part in the government’s decision.
Whatever the reason, the stockmarket – which takes an entirely amoral view of these things – thought this was good news and marked the shares of Imperial Tobacco up 2.5%, and British American Tobacco by 1% or so.
Investor cheer may be short-lived. If the UK government has conceded to the cockroaches, the EU may be ready to spray Raid pest control all over big tobacco. Its planned legislation could require up to 75% of the space on a packet to carry graphic health images, leaving the remaining 25% for colour and name branding.
Let’s see what the cockroaches do next.