Pepsi stirs controversy - but understands social media

Adage blogged a few days ago about a new Pepsi campaign that has exploded on the web. Pepsi created a print campaign for an edgy German magazine - it appears their target market is young, provocative, anti-establishment, etc.

The campaign theme is around there being one calorie in PepsiMax - the calorie becomes so lonely that it kills itself in fairly gory and blood-spattered ways. The creative seems like it’s influenced by cartoons such as Happy Tree Friends or even Itchy and Scratchy.

Unfortunately for Pepsi, this print ad was scanned and sent to an advertising blog, where it was forwarded on like the proverbial wildfire. Message boards went crazy with predominantly negative feedback (although also quite a few “lighten up” posts).

I spend my time cleaning suicide scenes for families that do not have the insurance or money to have it be done. With 90 to 100 suicides a day in the USA we are over whelmed with requests as 80% of these suicides are currently being cleaned up by the surviving family members. I would sure like to have Pepsi executives accompany me on a couple of our suicide scene cleaning jobs and then maybe they wouldn’t think such a topic was worthy for marketing a soft drink.

Twitterers also weighed in to the debate, furthering the reach of the ad.

I think it was a bad judgement call on choosing to publish the ad, but I can completely understand why they did - it was a one-off print campaign that was only going to be seen in one magazine in Germany for a specific audience. Taken out of context it’s tacky and offensive and insensitive. But then I think Happy Tree Friends is one of the funniest things I’ve seen, and that is completely insensitive and wrong. I think the ads have great artwork and they caught my attention - not that I’d ever drink Pepsi (or Coke).

But this is not a totally bad news story.

Pepsi used social media to apologise to bloggers, tweeters and commenters. The Director of Social and Emerging Media (how can I get myself job title like that?) emailed the Adage author after he tweeted his post.

I saw your tweet and I just wanted to make sure I responded personally. We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologize and please know it won’t run again. Also, thanks for the feedback and the Digg, it is important to discuss these types of issues.

My best friend committed suicide and this is a topic very close to my heart. So again I offer my deepest apologies.

Feel free to follow-up via twitter to me - @boughb or Huw - @huwgilbert or respond to this email.

I think this was a really bold move from Pepsi and should be applauded - it’s not often that a company will admit in public they were wrong and made a mistake. If you have a look at Huw Gilbert or B. Bonin Bough’s twitter stream, they are actually interacting and responding to their critics.

With social media, this is all it takes - show your users and critics that you’re human and can make mistakes, but you’re listening to feedback. Don’t just shut down and pretend everything is going well. They made a bad decision but then haven’t we all at some point?

You can watch the sentiment change on Twitter as soon as Pepsi apologised. There is lots of outrage and indignation when the ads were first exposed, then the apology, then a few re-tweets of the apology… and now most tweeters are on-side with Pepsi. I haven’t seen anything negative about them since they’ve publically apologised and admitted they were wrong.

I think Pepsi has learnt an important lesson from this - everything on the internet will spread. You can no longer just publish ads in one market for one target market. It’s going to get out and may be scrutinised by a much wider audience than you originally intended - so before you approve an ad, ask if you’re going to stand behind it if the “wrong” people see it.

But their response is also a lesson to any companies thinking about engaging in social media. You have to be prepared to engage with your critics and have a conversation. You need to be able to admit you make mistakes. And you have to be honest.

This post is tagged under: Marketing, transparency