The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Marketing decision · 2017
Pepsi pulled a Kendall Jenner ad in 24 hours for trivializing protest
The 2017 ad showed Jenner handing a Pepsi to a police officer at a protest, implying soda could ease police brutality. Pepsi yanked it within a day.
PepsiCo · 2017-04
What happened
In April 2017, Pepsi released a two-and-a-half-minute ad from its 'Live for Now' campaign, starring model Kendall Jenner. In it, Jenner leaves a photo shoot to join a generic, smiling street protest, then walks up to a stoic police officer and hands him a can of Pepsi. He smiles; the crowd cheers. The ad presented itself as a statement about unity and protest.
The reaction was immediate and furious. Critics — including the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., who tweeted a pointed joke about her father and Pepsi — said the ad trivialized the real, often dangerous protests against police brutality and racial injustice, reducing them to a backdrop for selling soda. The image of a privileged celebrity resolving deep social tension with a soft drink struck many as tone-deaf at best, offensive at worst.
Within a day, Pepsi pulled the ad and issued an apology, saying it had 'missed the mark' and was 'trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding,' and apologizing to Jenner for putting her in that position. The ad became an instant case study in marketing failure — a textbook example of a brand reaching for social relevance and grabbing the third rail instead.
Why it happened
- The ad borrowed the visual language of real protest movements — including echoes of iconic civil-rights photographs — to sell a sugary drink, which read as exploitation.
- It implied a complex, painful social problem could be soothed by a product, trivializing the people actually affected.
- The protest in the ad was generic and risk-free, stripped of the real stakes that give such movements their meaning.
- A brand chasing 'relevance' confused referencing a social issue with understanding or respecting it.
The lesson
Borrowing the imagery of a real struggle to sell a product isn't solidarity — it's exploitation, and audiences can tell. If your ad needs a social movement as a prop, the movement isn't yours to use.
Aftermath
Pepsi withdrew the ad within 24 hours and apologized, and the episode became one of the most cited examples of tone-deaf advertising in the social-media era. It is taught as a warning about 'woke-washing' — brands co-opting social-justice imagery without substance or standing. The lesson for marketers is sharp: authenticity can't be staged, and a movement that people are risking something for is not a prop for your product. The protests the ad gestured at were real; the ad's understanding of them plainly was not.
Sources
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