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The Pepsi Ad, United Airlines and Sean Spicer.
Disasters, it is said, come in threes.
The good folks at Pepsi had their sights on engaging the latest iteration of their generation—the Mo-llenials—the generation that followed the Millenials that just looks like more of the same, and they made an ad with a celebrity famous for being born to a famous family, but with no other discernible skill.
The idea was not unlike fellow ads on television at the time, a shallow, pretentious and ridiculously artificial message for a generation of people living similar pretend lives in social media. All perfectly lit and treated and smiling and wonderfully fortunate, but at the same time so very sensitive to the earth and justice and fun sneakers. In the ad, a celebrity famous only for being born famous, leaves a modeling shoot to join another, that is set in the theme of a protest staged by Benetton and Urban Outfitters. Stereotypes and derivative themes ensue. The model gives the model cop a Pepsi and all is well on main street USA.
Cue the outrage.
How dare they, what an abomination, so shallow, so marginalizing. The social media cognoscenti poised to press their indignation emoji button huffed and puffed and took the ad down. Pepsi was just about to seriously apologize when…
The good folks at United Airlines were doing what airlines have been doing to their customers for generations, treating them shabbily and with spectacular disregard, taking them for granted and transporting them like recalcitrant cattle, sucking every piece of profit margin out of every square inch of every fuselage in the fleet.
But one Friendly Skies staffer took the time-honored customer service policy as literal, it reads “Feel free to abuse the passengers, they are so annoying.” So, he beat and dragged a customer off an oversold flight. The contract says they can. That employee has almost certainly been viciously counseled and will have to undergo some kind of anger management. However, to set things right, the CEO of United came out straight to proclaim, United had every right to beat the snot out of that doctor. First, it says so in the contract, and second, he’s Asian, and he was so annoying.
Somebody at United apparently got through to their CEO, while he was creating his press statements on intermittent breaks from his retreat with the Bilderbergs, to advise him to change his approach, which he did, but it was too late, he was doomed unless…
The White House Press Secretary defended Hitler. “Even Hitler didn’t use gas on his own people.”
Everyone agreed, the Pepsi Ad seemed really bad at first, and then we all realized it was just pretend and silly actually, when we all had the chance to watch the real-life United Airlines fiasco, and really get mad for a good reason; and just as we were lighting our torches with our Mileage Plus statements, Sean Spicer reminded us all what criminally ignorant really looks like. We are the Spicer Generation. That is bad.
Perhaps as a gesture of international remediation we should all reconsider Nickelback, were they really all that awful?
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