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Yesterday Kendall Jenner and Skip Marley (yes, he’s Bob Marley’s grandson) teamed up with soft drink giant Pepsi to put out an ad that was so tone deaf the company decided to pull it less than 24 hours later.
Now, both Pepsi and Coke have a long history of enlisting celebrities and musicians and models and political causes to help sell soda, but the whole event has sparked a lot of people weighing in on the subject. One such person is Madonna, a musician who has never been afraid to speak brashly about political causes.
In this case, she used emojis and Instagram to do the talking, posting a pic of herself enjoying Coca-Cola — not Pepsi — and using only the emoji of a first place medal to caption it. Okay, I’ll give her this moment of shade, but just a single moment. Because, sure, Coke didn’t put out yesterday’s commercial co-opting the protest movement, but that doesn’t make them a harbinger of empathy and grace either. The entire reason the ad was so offensive is because of how serious these causes are, and how they’re spawned by desperate conditions of many marginalized groups in America. Madonna speaking out on their behalf would’ve done a lot more than aligning herself with another mega-corporation.
Maybe instead of shading Pepsi Madonna could’ve thrown some support behind the Black Lives Matter movement the same way she did the Women’s March in DC? Just a thought, while we’re out here in the trenches of the soda wars. I’m not above a chuckle at her post either, but remember, Coke isn’t your friend just because Pepsi f*cked up.
