The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2013
Mountain Dew pulled a 'Filly' ad called the most racist in history
Mountain Dew's 2013 ad by Tyler, The Creator showed a battered waitress mocked by a goat cop in a lineup of Black men. It was pulled the same day.
Mountain Dew · 2013-05
What happened
In May 2013, Mountain Dew released the last of three online ads directed by the rapper Tyler, The Creator, starring his recurring character Felicia the Goat. In the ad, a battered waitress is put in a police lineup between five Black men while Felicia, a goat voiced by Tyler, taunts her — 'better not snitch on a player', 'snitches get stitches' — until she shrieks and flees. The earlier ads had the goat assaulting the waitress and being pulled over for 'DewUI', a pun on the brand's slogan.
The backlash was immediate. Syracuse University professor Boyce Watkins called it 'arguably the most racist commercial in history', citing the parade of Black men on par with an animal and mocking the idea that this was how to appeal to Black consumers. Critics also attacked the ad's joking treatment of domestic violence and disability.
PepsiCo pulled the ad from all its channels on 1 May 2013 and asked Tyler to remove it too. The company said it 'understood how this video could be perceived by some as offensive' and apologized; Mountain Dew's own Twitter account called the ad a 'big mistake'. The episode became a case study in how edgy, youth-focused advertising can cross every line at once — and how a brand's approval process can let it happen.
Why it happened
- The ad stacked offenses: racial caricature, a joke about domestic violence and disability, all in service of a soda brand.
- A famous director's 'edgy' creative was pushed straight to air with no effective review, because shock was the point.
- The brand had handed its voice to a creator whose content was part of the problem, without anyone checking the fit.
- Once the ad went viral, the apology could not keep pace with the damage — 'big mistake' read as an admission, not a repair.
The lesson
Shock is a promise a brand has to keep. Mountain Dew bought edginess from a creator whose work mocked the very groups it needed to sell to — and no approval step caught it before the world did.
Aftermath
The ad was removed from Mountain Dew's channels and the brand moved on, but the episode stayed in advertising courses as a catalogue of what not to do: racial stereotyping, trivializing violence, and delegating brand voice to a creator without guardrails. It landed in a season of tone-deaf ad scandals — Hyundai, McDonald's and Ford all pulled spots in the same weeks — and helped push brands toward stricter review of celebrity- and creator-made content.
Sources
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