The world really sucks right now. Like really, really sucks; sucks on a level I honestly didn’t think we were culturally capable of slipping back to on such a global scale. Decades of gains for social, cultural, and environmental progress are being unraveled before our very eyes at such a rate that it’s making us all dizzy. What used to be parades to celebrate the successes we’ve had have reverted back into the very marches and demonstrations that were necessary to bring about that change in the first place. We’re more divided, more polarized, more hateful, and more anxious to do battle with one another than we’ve been for many decades and certainly more than we’ve ever been in my lifetime.
And leave it to big corporations to try and capitalize on that.
Now, big companies trying to utilize current events to sell us products is nothing new. Hell, just about everyone has made some sort of ad that features social media in some way at this point. Those wanting to sell you something need to appear relevant to your world so you’ll be willing to let them be a part of it. It’s nothing new, but it’s not really ever felt as…well…unfortunate as this. This isn’t a new fad or tech advancement that’s changing our lives in exciting ways that will hilariously become our new version of mundanity a few years down the line. These are issues that affect people’s freedoms, safety, and basic humanity. This is like if Walmart had made a commercial in 1992 that somehow involved the LA Riots. It’s just…not…okay.
Yet, here we are. More and more we’re seeing corporations try to take the supercharged climate of our political and cultural divide and to use it as a framing device for their call to buy their product. I’ve come to call this practice “Corporate Branded Peace Solutions” for reasons that will become more apparent later on. So far there have been two major examples of this, one from soda maker Pepsi and another from beer brewer Heineken. The Pepsi ad is so bad it literally caused a public backlash and calls for boycotts but the beer commercial is a completely different creature. I went into watching the Heineken ad expecting to be just as outraged as I was watching Kendall Jenner save the world with a can of soda, but I wasn’t. In fact, I was actually moved to tears! How could two different commercials utilizing the same marketing technique arrive at such radically different results? Well, before we deconstruct these ads, we first need to watch them.
Ladies, gentlemen, and friends of all genders, I give you the worst soda commercial I’ve ever seen.
*cringe*
And now, the ad from Heineken.
If you’re like me, you had very different reactions between the two videos. There are obvious differences, sure, but when you dig deeper there’s so much more going on. So, let’s do just that.
Keeping it real
Right off the bat, we have real versus fake. In one ad you have actors pretending and following a script whereas in the other you have real people doing what they would naturally do in the given situation. That alone makes a huge difference. When you’re dealing with a subject where relatability is more necessary than ever, it’s vital for your audience to make a close connection to what they see (and I can tell you I’ve teared up every time the transgender woman talks about herself).
But the concept of reality is more than just the people. The Pepsi ad showed a protest about nothing specific. Seriously, it’s like they’ve just been vaguely paying attention to the news for the last several months and put a happy filter over what they just briefly glanced at. I mean, the Pepsi “protesters” sure looked like they were all having fun, didn’t they? It was like if someone decided to throw a Black Lives Matter protest themed party (and just typing that out makes me want to vomit). All the signs were extremely generic too. There was no specificity as to what they were marching about other than “let’s get along”.
That alone is insulting to the people actually out in the streets protesting because their lives and freedoms are on the line. The Heineken ad actually discussed the real issues, and let the people living the fight tell the story. That’s some really powerful stuff that resonates with audiences.
The Happy Ending
Nothing about the Pepsi ad conveyed any real sense of conflict, so it’s not surprising that the world seemed to be saved by Kendall Jenner giving a Pepsi to a cop (a white, male cop who drank it while a bunch of black men cheered and smiled; Christ this thing is tone-deaf; Pepsi gets no points for being multi cultural in their ad, largely because of that). This is where my notion of Corporate Branded Peace Solutions comes into play. On the surface it’s just the insulting notion that said company’s product is the key to bringing about peace and harmony. But sub-textually it conveys a sense that the problems people are protesting and getting heated about aren’t really that big a deal. Pepsi’s ad is literally a two and a half minute film about the privileged notion that all of this just stems from a lack of communication and that if we’d only talk over a soda things would get better. As a transgender woman living in North Carolina, I can tell you that giving a Pepsi to any of the lawmakers making it their life’s mission to legislate me out of existence wouldn’t do a damn thing to make them stop. All I’d accomplish is making sure the new law barring me from using the restroom or seeking protections from hate crimes would be stained with a condensation ring.
By contrast, the Heineken ad gives you no notion that “sitting down and discussing our differences over a beer” is going to fix everything. It’s meant to be a start. There’s a real sense that the problems are still there, that there are still disagreements. We never actually hear those two guys talk about climate change after all. They might not have come to any kind of agreement. The world is not fixed, but it’s a little bit better, and that’s somewhere you can start from. Our product will be there as you do the work to bring about the change; that message is one of my favorite things about this ad, but it’s not my most favorite.
Having the guts to pick a side
There’s no sense even bringing up the Pepsi garbage in this section because it didn’t even have spine enough to mention an actual issue in the first place. Instead we got a bunch of peace symbols and signs saying ‘join the conversation’, ‘love’, and ‘unity’. It was all meaningless noise. Heineken actually brought up real issues and, very subtly, chose a winner. It didn’t really happen with the climate change part, but think about the other two groups. The anti-feminist toasts to ‘smashing the patriarchy’, and it’s quite obvious that the man who was anti-trans was completely changed.
Heineken’s ad dared to go even further than the issues. Having already done so much right, it would have been a real letdown to end on the tired, blatantly untrue notion that everyone’s a little right and the truth is found somewhere in the middle. That’s a load of crap and Heineken was having no part of it. The patriarchy needs to be dismantled. Transgender people are just people. These are facts and there’s no logic in having a discerning opinion on them (the same is true for the very real threat of climate change but that didn’t get the same kind of resolution in the ad).
Look, I really don’t want this to become normal. I’ve already seen this kind of branding seeping it’s way into other marketing schemes, but that’s so far been in non-national companies that aren’t really worth bringing into this discussion yet. Any company wanting to try this is going to be walking a tight rope without a net to catch them. Pepsi demonstrated how it can go bafflingly wrong whereas Heineken showed me that, despite my great skepticism going in, it is actually possible to pull this off.
Just, no one else try this…please? I don’t know what you’re selling, but I promise it’s not going to save the world.