By: Claire Vaughn

The “Live for Now” Pepsi campaign was launched on April 4, 2017, in an attempt to promote Pepsi as being a friendly brand whose goal was to “protect a global message of unity, peace, and understanding”. In trying to execute this goal, Pepsi came out with a two-minute-long video, showing an ethnically diverse, but color- coordinated crowd of young individuals starting a protest. In this video, Kendall Jenner steps in with a can of Pepsi for the police officer in an attempt to “save the day”. Due to the numerous amounts of criticism from social media users claiming that this advertisement was co-opting protest movements (such as the Black Lives Matter) for commercial gain, Pepsi had to pull the campaign from being aired to the public less than 48 hours later. One can say that Pepsi is still a popular brand to buy from, but I could argue that this campaign may have damaged their globally- recognized brand name forever. 

            It is no secret that Pepsi’s marketing strategy consumes of well-known celebrities and sponsorships to promote their brand. The Pepsi company uses these well-known celebrities to appeal to their target audience, who consist of teens, young adults, and early middle-aged adult consumers. With Kendal Jenner being the star of this “Live for Now” Pepsi campaign, Pepsi attempted to execute their goal of reaching the target audience by using star Kendal Jenner. This commercial shows supermodel Kendal Jenner posing for a photoshoot where she is wearing designer clothes and dark lipstick, giving a youthful and energetic appearance to the viewers. We see her change into a denim outfit and take off her wig to hand to a perplexed woman. In the end of the commercial, Jenner approaches a police officer and cracks open a can of Pepsi soda for him to drink. The officer then drinks the soda and the crowd cheers. Pepsi did succeed in reaching their target audience (me), but in a negative way.

            The Campaign Objective of the “Live for Now” Pepsi campaign was aimed to target the youth audience to stand together in our world’s protests, regardless of genders, race, and status in society. The protest was a movement that was intended to promote and unify individuals of different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. Pepsi also claimed that the opening of the can was used to remind the audience how nice and simulating it would feel to hold a can of Pepsi, but I thought it meant more than that. In my opinion, I thought Pepsi was trying to make it seem as though protests and disagreements in our society can be a quick fix. Doing a small task like drinking a Pepsi, was a simple cure to all real-life problems and protests. This campaign was clearly meant to explain to the youth audience that there are better and more important things going on in our life other than protects and political differences. I have a problem with that statement because I believe this country needs to fight for what we stand for. We live in a society where there exist numerous distinct ethnic and cultural groups, so different voices of opinions are going to be expressed across the media. Pepsi should not promote to the younger generation that there is an easy way of creating an equal change.

            The failure of creative and media strategies is a prime example as to how Pepsi’s company failed to research and communicate with each other when trying to promote this brand idea. The criticism that Pepsi got for creating this campaign shows us that Pepsi failed to reach out to a diverse audience before publishing it to the public. This concludes to my belief that Pepsi went against their own “Live for Now” Pepsi campaign because they failed in the focus of their intended message. Instead, their focus was gaining success in their company, instead of trying to also spread awareness to our country. This concludes that Pepsi failed to share their ideas with a diverse range of individuals before publishing and because of this, they almost got canceled.