Abstract
This paradigm repair study contributes to advertising ethics research by analyzing discourse from trade publications and press outlets regarding the divisive 2017 Kendall Jenner Pepsi advertisement. After the controversary surrounding the commercial ensued, actors within and outside the advertising industry argued the ad violated the ethical boundaries of the industry because it coopted a social issue, acted as a form of cultural appropriation, and served as an example of brand activism (gone awry). This study examines the reasons why this happened and concludes with an argument for paradigm repair's utility for studying advertising ethics, and with implications for advertising practice.
In early April of 2017, Pepsi released an advertisement featuring reality television star Kendall Jenner meant to project “a global message of unity, peace and understanding” (Pepsico, 2017). Unfortunately for the brand, the commercial did not accomplish its goal; instead it led to outrage and quickly attracted media coverage, online opinions and widespread ridicule (Hill, 2017). The commercial depicted Jenner drinking a Pepsi and walking through a group of diverse protesters. Eventually, Jenner notices a large group of protesters being watched closely by some police officers. She then removes a wig and moves toward one of the officers, hands him a Pepsi, and the protestors cheer wildly. The reaction to the ad was immediate and negative, as most argued it attempted to economically capitalize on social justice movements, specifically the Black Lives Matter movement, and trivialized the reasons behind protests (Handley, 2017). Many in the media and advertising industry bluntly chastised Pepsi, arguing, for example, that the brand seemingly believed that “if the Black Lives Matter movement were led by a 21-year-old white supermodel armed with a can of fizzy soda, then maybe everyone would just get along” (Smith, 2017). Within a day, Pepsi apologized and pulled the commercial. Never, though, did Pepsi articulate to the public what they believed was wrong with the ad (Hill, 2017).
One of the most optimal manners to understand how an institution such as the advertising industry creates and enforces its boundaries surrounding what is a legitimate practice and what is not is to examine published discourse concerning issues facing the industry (Schmidt, 2010). This method can be especially salient and effective after an industry experiences a “critical incident,” which is defined as a happening that occurs and catalyzes actors from both inside and outside an industry to publicly reflect on their practices, specifically, and their industries more generally (Thomas et al., 2020). Hymes (1980) defined an interpretive community as a group held together by a shared view of reality; and Zelizer (1993) took the concept one step further by arguing that most industries are interpretative communities in that their ethical norms are only partly official rules, and that most meanings surrounding an industry are socially constructed through a discursive dialog primarily between people within the industry, but also with actors from the outside.
An examination of metadiscourse allows researchers the ability to better understand how an industry sets its boundaries of practice. In other words, in many industries, normative practices are not determined through laws a clear, industry-wide code, but rather a discursive social construction process that occurs between actors within and outside the industry and results in normative boundaries of practice (Ferrucci & Canella, 2021; Vos & Singer, 2016). Specifically, advertising is in constant informal communication with itself and various audiences and other stakeholders, and it is through this conversation that norms are determined and redetermined (Gieryn, 1983). In advertising, norms and boundaries are set over time; moreover, like any institution, advertising is a system of rules, norms and beliefs (Kuhn, 2012; Parsons, 2007).
Despite numerous industry groups such as the American Advertising Federation and the Association of National Advertisers, there are few “official” rules of advertising. Therefore, much of what constitutes the norms of advertising are determined through a discursive process, making the industry an interpretative community. Analyzing content produced by an industry and about that industry can illustrate how normative practices are legitimized, but they can also demonstrate how practitioners delineate boundaries – such as what is ethically right and what is ethically wrong – around the industry (Berkowitz, 2000; Carlson, 2016; Ferrucci, 2021).
The Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial presents a critical incident, an opportunity to study how the advertising industry discursively constructs its normative practices and guidelines. Advertising, like most industries is a paradigm in that it is implicitly governed by a set of broad shared assumptions that guide the practice (Bennett et al., 1975). These assumptions are formed and disseminated through a discursive process that primarily includes actors from within the profession; oftentimes, these boundaries of practice are communicated in industry-wide prominent spaces such as association codes of ethics or, most saliently, trade magazines (Carlson, 2016). The rules or boundaries within a paradigm are fluid and change over time depending on social and cultural mores along with critical incidents within the industry (Zelizer, 1993), but overall, the makeup of a paradigm limits the range of acceptable behaviors and practiced within, in this case, an industry (Hindman, 2005). When a paradigm violation occurs, such as the case with Pepsi, it presents an opportunity to better understand what is acceptable and unacceptable within an industry because implicit norms become explicit in discourse presented to both insiders and outsiders (Hindman & Thomas, 2013). An investigation into how the industry discursively reacted to a paradigm violation can illustrate how practitioners attempt to repair their profession's reputation through communication to and from both actors inside and outside the industry (Vos & Moore, 2020).
This study examines the advertising industry's response to the Pepsi commercial using paradigm repair to comprehend the response as justification for the ethical boundaries of advertising. Paradigm repair comes from cultural studies and sociology and allows researchers the ability to understand previous implicit or unknown norms and standards (Hindman & Thomas, 2013). Specifically, paradigm repair allows researchers to understand what paradigm violation or violations occurred and why those violations occurred. In short, this study examines the response to the aforementioned derided advertisement through a textual analysis of both advertising trade journal articles and traditional media outlets.
Literature Review
Advertising Ethics Research
Since the 1970s, advertising ethics research largely focused on one of three topics: how advertising practitioners view ethics; how the public perceives ethical issues and, as a result, perceives advertising overall; and organizational and industry-wide codes of ethics (i.e., Drumwright & Murphy, 2004; Fukukawa et al., 2007; Schauster et al., 2016; Waller, 1999). Coinciding with these studies, albeit in limited quantity, are examinations of individual advertising practitioners’ moral reasoning (i.e., Cunningham, 2005; Schauster et al., 2020). However, the majority of work examining how practitioners follow and enact normative ethical practices in advertising consist of long-form interviews with practitioners or ethnographic studies of specific organizations. While all these types of studies help illuminate the ways in which the advertising industry grapples with ethical situations, none focus on how the industry presents itself to the public and defines itself internally. For example, interviews with practitioners and ethnographies of specific organizations cannot be generalized, are subject to the perceptions of the participants and researchers, and do not involve the public. While codes of ethics are often available internally and externally, prior work shows their effects can be superficial at best. However, if a study focused on how an industry is presented to the public, including how the industry communicates about ethics and normative behavior to itself and the public, it would provide a different viewpoint.
Metadiscourse
Advertising, like many media industries, does not feature a discreet and consistent set of ethics and normative practices across organizations (Sparrow, 2006). Besides laws meant to regulate all industries, and some regulations specific to advertising, the profession follows an informal set of standards that are often unpublished or unsaid. In any industry, though, there are shared norms and practices that exist informally across the profession that, together, professionalize the industry and form the social reality of the institution (Sparrow, 2006). In effect, the institution of advertising, which includes a set of standards and practices, is formed by the many agencies and organizations that fall under its informal umbrella; this is the same as with any other institution (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017). But these normative practices and ethical guidelines do not exist in a vacuum; they are discursively communicated, formed, legitimized, cast aside and reified across the industry in a variety of ways (Berkowitz, 2000).
One framework often used to understand how norms emerge across an institution is discursive institutionalism, which posits that institutions as a whole provide actors with a roadmap or, effectively, a “meaning system” that can then be put into practice (Schmidt, 2010). Essentially, discursive intuitionalism argues that sites exist, such as trade news or in the press, where actors from inside and outside an industry discursively articulate, legitimize, delegitimize and fundamentally define the norms and practices of an institution (Carlson, 2016; Ferrucci, 2018). While this type of discourse often appears in trade journals, it can also come from those outside of advertising in the form of academic scholarship, the news media, advertising-centric blogs, satirical entertainment shows or even through the general public commenting online (Carlson, 2016). In effect, since industries are all part, in some form, of an interpretative committee, this discourse allows researchers a view into how the industry “talks to itself” and how actors outside of it talk back (Ferrucci et al., 2020, p. 1592).
Metadiscourse about an industry can generally be described as what practitioners “say about their capacity to do what they ought to do” (Craft & Thomas, 2016, p. 1). Because the norms and processes surrounding advertising have been socially constructed over time, this discourse oftentimes provides a glimpse into the “explicit interpretive processes justifying or challenging these practices and their practitioners” through their work (Carlson, 2016, p. 350). For any industry, trade magazines act as a central site of metadiscourse since industry-focused media content is specifically concerned with said industry communicating to itself; regardless of industry, trade magazines and websites are tasked with defining the industry to those inside of it (Hyland, 2017). In addition, studies of metadiscourse, for example in journalism studies, often seek to understand how an industry itself – often in tandem with the public – demarcates and legitimizes practices and defines potentially ambiguous but important terms (i.e., Ferrucci, 2020; Vos & Singer, 2016). For example, in advertising scholarship, Tucker (1998) examined how both advertising industry press and traditional media discursively dismissed the ethical breaches by the advertising industry surrounding the controversial Calvin Klein advertisements of the 1990s, a clear critical incident. Indeed, the most frequent studies concerning the intersection of metadiscourse and ethics, similar to Tucker (1998), examine how practitioners perform the act paradigm repair (Ruggiero, 2004).
Paradigm Repair
Paradigm repair is the process by which actors from inside and outside of a profession, attempt to repair the boundaries of the profession or provide the audience with a structure for understanding how practitioners should or should not act (Carlson, 2012; Coddington, 2012). Vos and Moore (2020) created a typology concerning how journalism studies scholars have studied paradigm repair. They found that five different types of paradigm repair studies exist: paradigm building (studies that show how normative behaviors come to be): paradigm experimentation (i.e. when news organizations attempt a change what does not work and then justify it), paradigm innovation (when a change experiment works), paradigm formalization (when an organization makes a new change official through a mission statement, press release, etc.), paradigm normalization (when the industry argues for the existence of a practice), and paradigm reconsideration (a counter-hegemonic turn questioning a specific norm).
Paradigm repair studies encompass all those types of work, but, in totality, the discourse that makes up these types of studies all discursively attempt to sway how industry norms are constructed by both industry practitioners and the general public. For example, after Princess Diana died in a car accident while chased by paparazzi, many blamed journalism; after the accident, many journalists utilized paradigm repair by publishing discourse attempting to make clear to the public the difference between journalists and paparazzi (Berkowitz, 2000). In essence, whenever anything disrupts an industry in a major way, especially negative, practitioners often produce content that attempts to delegitimize unacceptable practices and provide a framework for industry practitioners and the public to understand normative ethics, what is acceptable and where boundaries exist (Cecil, 2002; Hindman, 2005; Thomas & Hindman, 2015).
While the majority of industries do not have official rules or regulations that are enforceable, all professions, over time, develop a paradigm of practice. Philosopher Thomas Kuhn (2012) defined a paradigm as a set of norms, values, standards, and practices, and contended that all fields or industries form their own. Industries such as advertising often have industry-wide and organization-specific codes of ethics that define what is and is not ethical practice (Ikonen et al., 2017). These codes form a foundation of the industry's paradigm, but, also, a “paradigm itself is largely implicit and hegemonic, often existing as unwritten codes of conduct or patterns of behavior” that remain invisible, implicit and not publicly noted unless and until something violates paradigmatic boundaries (Vos and Moore, 2020, p. 18).
Paradigm repair research always implicitly and explicitly is a form of boundary work (Vos & Moore, 2020). Insiders “patrol” boundaries by doing the work of paradigm repair (Coddington, 2012). Sociologist Gieryn (1983) introduced the concept of boundary work, which he described as a process by which members of a profession define who and who does not belong in the occupational group. This is accomplished by members of a profession articulating a social taxonomy that defines, in a fluid manner, who is and who is not a professional in that industry (Gieryn, 1983). In media, one of the main manners professionals separate themselves from non-professionals, or draw boundaries around their profession, is through identifying acceptable and unacceptable practices (Singer, 2015). Consequently, there are boundaries of practice around all occupations and these form an “individual and collective effort to influence the social, symbolic, material or temporal boundaries, demarcations and distinctions affecting groups, occupations and organizations” (Langley et al., 2019, p. 705). Unlike closed models of professionalism such as the medical field where someone needs degrees and licenses to practice, advertising is more open in that there are few barriers to entry, which makes drawing boundaries around ethical practices all the more important (Mirer, 2019). Hence, when scholars utilize paradigm repair, they are examining the discursive strategies used by insiders and outsiders to define the boundaries of practice (Gieryn, 1983).
While scholars of mass communication have often studied paradigm repair through journalism, the concept has been explored in other disciplines. Riis et al. (1997) considered how leaders apply situational maintenance and paradigm repair after a negative event happens to organizations. Others have applied the concept to understand how the boundaries of ethical practice are discursively negotiated in the justice system (London, 2006), or in media industries in general (Wasserman, 2008). While advertising organizations remain bound to follow certain laws, the ethics and acceptable and unacceptable practices of the industry are constantly socially constructed over time, changing and altering with the cultural, political and economic context of the moment. An example of paradigm repair can often be identified through an industry publicly commenting on various shared rituals not followed in a particular case (Ehrlich, 1996). In the case of the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad, the manner in which advertising trade magazines consistently and frequently identified bad decisions and unethical or, at minimum, non-normative practices by the creators of the advertisement, fulfills the definition of an event of paradigm repair, as it is clearly an example of “an effort by a professional community to maintain itself by enacting special and infrequently used cultural rituals” (Berkowitz, 2000, p. 125).
Hence, this current study examines how the advertising industry attempted to repair its paradigm after the widespread condemnation of the industry following the Kendall Jenner Pepsi advertisement. The study assesses, according to discourse published in the aftermath of the commercial's release to the public, both what aspects of the advertisement violated ethical norms of the industry and what was to blame for the ethical violations. Therefore, this study asks the following research questions:
RQ1: How did insiders and outsiders of the profession discursively define the ethical paradigm violations of the advertisement?
RQ2: How did the discourse discursively explain why paradigm violations occurred?
Method
Craft and Thomas (2016) argued that studies focusing on understanding media ethics through the use of metadiscourse lend themselves best to textual analysis. They wrote that such work provides significant value because “it can help bridge the gap between empirical and normative work in the media ethics realm” (p. 4). Textual analysis is a means of learning about, in this case, the public and a profession by examining how they discuss themselves (Berger, 1998). Analyzing text to elucidate potential meaning allows researchers the ability to see the likely manners in which the industry and the public – the receivers – could socially construct meaning (Miller, 2010). Zelizer (1993), using the literature of sociology and cultural studies, contended that language is often the site where industries and normative behaviors are both legitimized and contested. In effect, “media content is an important site of the ongoing struggle over meaning and common sense” and a textual analysis of said content can help provide an understanding how both an industry and the public understands and defines concepts (Fursich, 2009, p. 248).
For this particular study, the researchers conducted a textual analysis of articles about the Pepsi advertisement published in both advertising trade magazines and mainstream press. Therefore, this study includes a combination of both metadiscourse from advertising trade magazines and discourse from traditional media outlets. Incorporating discourse from actors inside and outside an industry is a common approach in studies of metadiscourse of advertising (e.g., Tucker, 1998) and other industries such as journalism (e.g., Craft et al., 2016), or academia (e.g., Hyland, 2017). Utilizing a sample of articles from both insiders and outsiders is done because the boundaries of practice within a paradigm are not solely defined by insiders; these boundaries are formed through a discursive conversation between insiders and outsiders (Vos & Moore, 2020). Therefore, the ethical violations perpetrated by Pepsi are communicated to insiders through trade publications, but also to the public through external and internal actors communicating in traditional media. Together, these discursive conversations identify the paradigm violations and why they occurred.
The public first had the ability to view the ad online on April 4. Therefore, to understand how the reaction to the ensuing and unexpected controversy, the researchers examined salient content about the Pepsi advertisement from the selected publications published between April 4 and April 11 of 2017. The unit of analysis for this study was all of the text within each complete article, with special attention paid to quotations or paraphrasing from advertising professionals. For a study such as this one, researchers utilize textual analysis because “media texts present a distinctive discursive moment between encoding and decoding that justifies special scholarly engagement” (Fursich, 2009, p. 238). The method allows researchers the ability to go beyond the manifest content of messages (Larsen, 1991), permitting researchers to distinguish “implicit patterns, assumptions and omissions of a text” (Fursich, 2009, p. 241) that otherwise would be inaccessible. For this particular study, the researchers analyzed the data in the empirical manner outlined by Emerson et al. (1995). This is a three-step process. First, the researchers read through the entirety of the data, jotting down notes. Second, the researchers performed another complete analysis of the discourse, in this instance seeking emergent themes or patterns. After concurring on themes, the researchers once again did a thorough analysis, this time with patterns and themes in mind, and categorized data within these emerged themes. A search of all trade publications, as identified by Advertising Age, and a Factiva search for all traditional news articles found, after removing duplicates, 113 articles, 41 from trade publications and 71 from the traditional news outlets. An n of 113 is a representative number not dissimilar from similar studies (i.e., Berkowitz, 2000; Ferrucci, 2019; Hindman, 2005) (Table 1).
Publications Included in the Analysis.
Finally, following the blueprint provided by Vos and Singer (2016) and numerous other similar studies, this paper attempts to provide a snapshot of the industry. Therefore, the findings, paraphrased and quoted, exclude publication citations. By excluding this identifying information, the specific outlets are given the same explanatory weight and the field at large is represented, suggesting that paradigm repair occurs in both industry and traditional press and that, again, paradigm repair is process involving both insiders and outsiders (Tucker, 1998). Studies of metadiscourse often seek to understand how an industry itself demarcates and legitimizes practices and defines potentially ambiguous but important norms by analyzing a combination of traditional media, trade publications and media criticism (i.e., Vos & Singer, 2016). Utilizing a sample of articles of this combination is done because the boundaries of practice are formed through a discursive struggle for epistemic power over the industry (Vos & Moore, 2020).
Analysis
This study seeks to answer two fundamental research questions: What violated the paradigm and why did it happen. After a careful reading of the data and a thorough analysis, the results illustrate how three main themes emerged surrounding the first research question: those within and outside the boundaries of advertising believed the Pepsi advertisement coopted a social issue, engaged in cultural appropriation, and attempted brand activism, all violations of the paradigm.
What Violated the Paradigm
Coopted a Social Issue
The most prominent violation, according to the metadiscourse analyzed, committed by the Pepsi advertisement surrounded the fact that the ad depicted an ongoing social issue for commercial gain. Numerous authors, both from mainstream and industry press, noted that that the company seemed to want to emulate the iconic Coca-Cola “hilltop” ad from 1971. But, in making this connection, authors suggested that the “hilltop” advertisement depicted something completely fictional, while the Pepsi ad “borrowed imagery of something important,” “makes light of a serious issue,” and “coopts the politics of protest, particularly as they surround race relations in America today.” The Pepsi ad invokes a “now iconic photo of Black Lives Matter protester Ieshia Evans,” thereby conclusively making a comment about an ongoing civil rights struggle. As noted by a popular industry trade magazine, brands should not “weigh in on current events, especially those with a political tint” since it will upset consumers on both sides of the issue, and especially those on same side of the issue who feel like the issue is being trivialized.
Furthermore, discourse often noted that commercial advertisements surrounding a current social issue often backfires on the brand; the Pepsi ad “coopted protest movements such as Black Lives Matter for commercial gain.” Many within and outside the industry believe that advertisements do not have a place in social commentary that a commercial, and specifically the Pepsi one, violated norms because it tried to “derive some form of cultural sensibility from something that's designed to be vacuous.” The ad is “a shortsighted commodification of free expression.” A typical sentiment argued that brands and corporations should “focus on selling their products in ways that don't exploit the pain and suffering of marginalized people.” Conclusively, the discourse argued that advertisers need to be aware that commenting on social issues only leads to negative reactions from the public because, at their core, commercials for brands are aimed at selling product. It then feels callous when a brand tries to commodify an issue. The discourse contended that when a brand makes this sort of commercial, it feels like a “marketing stunt” and not an actual commentary on the issue. Again, in comparison to the famous Coke hilltop commercial, Pepsi commercialized a controversial social issue, while Coke invented a situation and commercialized a universally lauded and “banal” sentiment of love is good. The Pepsi ad, according to an industry insider quoted in numerous articles, attempts to “literally commercialize struggle, pain and resistance.”
Finally, the last problem that arises when a brand coopts a social issue is that it inevitably does so in a way that is “not at all real” because they want to amass consumers and not actually discuss the issue. In a time period that places a premium on “honesty and reality,” Pepsi produced something wholly “inauthentic” and did not “exercise caution and stay real.” Essentially, the ad does not truthfully even discuss Black Lives Matter or protest culture in general, but it instead “represents a pervasive and persistent white liberal fantasy of U.S. protest politics that trivializes the long and oftentimes dangerous work of resistance and protest” because it is, overall, a “nauseating cynical pantomime of social engagement.”
Cultural Appropriation
The second most discussed violation of the advertising paradigm that Pepsi committed concerned cultural appropriation. The discourse argued that Pepsi attempted to commercialize a topic heavily connected to non-white citizens and did so in a way that simply resulted in “obscene cultural appropriation” by using “people from different cultures as props”; all of the main actors in the commercial were white. This cultural appropriation made the commercial appear as “straight out racism” that was “mocked as tone-deaf and culturally unaware.”
While the discourse contended that the use of, for example, “gibberish protest signs meant to signify Arabic” contributed to this appropriation, the main violation concerned the use of Kendall Jenner as the star. As noted in many different ways, Jenner is a member of the Kardashian family, which has a “vampiric relationship with black culture” in that they consistently use and enact black culture to sell material goods. By substituting “Jenner for black women,” the ad fails miserably because “no Kardashian has ever demonstrated any interest in anything social other than social media” and Jenner, in particular, is “the kind of privileged Richie that today's catch-all protest movement is railing against.” In more nuanced language, one article argued that the main violation committed by Pepsi involved using a lead actor with no connection to the cause, which made it look like Pepsi “paid her to appear in a scripted piece of content that was not based in any true meaning.”
Overall, brands and the advertising industry both have issues concerning cultural appropriation historically, and therefore should completely avoid wading into issues involving non-white cultural issues. “Culture-jacking ads are lazy” all the time and more so because advertising always “has an awkward relationship with racial diversity,” so when it attempts to “embrace diversity,” it simply cannot. In general, advertising has long had a “parasitic relationship with culture, most infamously when it comes to themes associated with African Americans,” so if brands realize this and avoid the topic, they will also avoid controversy and remain within the industry's current ethical boundaries.
Brand Activism
The final paradigm violation, and least frequently mentioned, involved brand activism. Very generally, the discourse argued that brands should avoid activism for a cause unless that cause connects to the brand's image. Effectively, brands can become activists only when there is “some organic connection” to the purpose, but the majority of brands cannot make a difference in social causes, so they should avoid becoming activists. Specifically, in terms of Pepsi, one article stated that “Pepsi believed it could make a difference but it's only soda. It can make a difference with thirst, not racial equality.” Effectively, by attempting to become an activist, a brand “screams a sense of omnipotence and a presumptuous belief” that it can make a difference, a belief that consumers can see right through and will often criticize because “being a large brand is not enough to justify bringing your voice to such an important discussion.” When a brand attempts to engage in activism, regardless of the cause, it oftentimes feels “exploitative” because commercials aiming to sell product do not bring social change, and a brand such as Pepsi does not have the power to enact change through a marketing campaign aimed at selling soda; brands are not “a lubricant in the machinery of human progress.”
Why the Paradigm Violations Occurred
The three main themes emerged concerning why the Pepsi ad violated normative practices of advertising. The “tone-deaf” and “stupid” advertisement made it to the public because Pepsi utilized an in-house creative agency instead of hiring an outside agency; that the advertising industry in general and Pepsi's in-house shop specifically suffer from a lack of diversity amongst practitioners; and the professional culture of the industry must be taken into account when producing content and Pepsi did not do this.
Using an in-House Creative Shop
The most prevalent theme concerned how Pepsi used an in-house creative shop to produce the ad. Essentially, instead of hiring a “top-notch agency” to produce an ad, Pepsi formed their own team, Creators League Studio, and made the ad themselves. This practice can negatively affect advertisements in a number of ways. For Pepsi, the brand “could have avoided a fiasco if they hadn't brought the assignment in-house.” The first problem that arises when using in-house creative results from “too few people in the chain saying ‘no.’” Essentially, outside shops have enough social capital and have earned “enough trust to be able to call bullshit on a client when a situation warrants it.” When brand go in-house, they are valuing “speed, efficiency and cost over quality, impact and craft” and that decision is diffused to the creative team who then are not as critical and “have a harder time disagreeing with the chain of command.”
While a lack of employee autonomy in terms of criticizing a potential idea can result from using an in-house staff, a bigger problem lies with the mindset of people also working for the brand. When employees of the brand also catalyze creative content for the brand, it often results in a “homogenous group of people” without “outside perspective” that would have “saved (Pepsi) from unleashing the spot.” This loss of perspective results in a creative team that “has lost touch with the realities of (the) customers.” Put simply, as one trade magazine did, in-house agencies “take great pride in cultivating strong internal brand cultures, but while these strong brand cultures contribute toward creating a cohesive workforce, they can also result in reality bubbles (because) employees become so convinced of a brand's value in the world.” The in-house shops suffer from “super-filtered corporate thought bubbles” that lead to brands suffering “from myopia when trying to articulate their own values to the marketplace.” Theoretically, an outside agency would have known that Pepsi should not comment on such a controversial political cause, while an internal shop overvalued the brand's power in the marketplace due to a parochial view of the company.
The other main reason an in-house shop advertisement could result in a fiasco like the one Pepsi encountered is because, according to trade magazine, in-house shops are just simply worse than outside agencies as they often are less diverse and lack resources such as time, money and expertise. One article argued “a good agency will provide objective examination, done with real rigor, of how, where, why and when to tell a brand story”; the article implied an in-house shop could not do this. An in-house shop also does not have a “diversity of client and sector experience, (a) deep understanding across different consumer groups and (a) rigorous culture of challenge, candor and competition.” Without those traits, an in-house shop is not as good as an outside agency. An in-house shop also does not have “the capability to test the ad concept with a wider network of consumers.” Finally, the leaders and employees at in-house shops are inevitably generally not as good as the ones working for independent agencies, which is why they are “stuck” at in-house shops. Very few ad practitioners at in-house shops “demonstrate the sustained ability to do world-class work” and the directors are “jaded, tired, old-timers who simply want to get paid and go home.”
A Lack of Diversity Amongst Practitioners
The second main theme that emerged about why Pepsi committed paradigm violations concerned the demographic makeup of the creative staff. The metadiscourse argued that the advertising industry as a whole suffers from a diversity problem as barely more than 5% of its workforce is non-white. More specifically, “only 4% of advertising executives are black” and the Pepsi ad expressly sums up “the zeitgeist of America the last few years: white media companies scrambling to steal from black creators.” Generally, the discourse contended that the Pepsi ad summarily dealt with an issue especially salient to the black community, but the ad itself was “put together by all-white team” that could not, at all, understand the unintended implications of the ad. The general lack of diversity in the advertising industry and the literally total lack of diversity in the Pepsi team contributed to a culture of people not totally understanding a subject. “This happens when you don't have enough people in leadership that reflect the cultures you represent,” said one article that went on to imply that brands and agencies should not try to create content that directly tries to appeal to cultures not represented within the brand's in-house shop or the agency. Without representation from other cultures, “there was not enough diversity or, worse, there was a culture that made people uncomfortable to express how offensive (the ad is).” Overall, it's clear that actors both inside and outside the advertising industry believe that the industry's lack of diversity leads to paradigm violations.
Professional Culture in Socially Connected Marketplace
Finally, the third theme that arose contended that the current professional culture within the industry is not conducive to producing effective content for a specific segment of today's society. Generally, due to the enormous amount of content across several platforms that reaches consumers today, the advertising industry's current practices often employ “risky brand strategies … to blast through the clutter.” Furthermore, brands are “lining up with more and more radical tricks and stunts to gain attention and try to snare the lion's share of precious voice.” For a brand, “appearing invisible” is a “walking nightmare,” so because of the aforementioned clutter, brands need “to be edgier and edgier.”
Historically, “edgy” advertising hasn't constituted a paradigm violation. Today, edginess and “radical tricks” coupled with today's “social media radicals” actually catalyzes the violations. Effectively, the Pepsi ad would have been tone deaf regardless of when it was created, but it would have been a blip on Pepsi's radar if not for the voice social media provides to “millennial” activists or “young people with smartphones” who are “irate social media users” and looking for issues. Pepsi only received “criticism from social media” and that led to mainstream press discussing the issue. And even that criticism only came from a small segment of social media users as advertisers now “are increasingly in the crosshairs of populist activists aided by the power and reach of social media.” That power of social media allows people “to create disruption and chaos.” Largely, when you combine the pressure brands and advertising agencies are under to create content that stands out in a saturated marketplace with a small segment of people who use social media to criticize content, there is good chance an agency will commit a violation that will lead to a social media criticism campaign.
Discussion
Historically, it is understood that advertising is the practice of creating and placing paid, promotional strategies to garner attention, share information and persuade an audience to purchase goods and services. Recently, industry practices involve more socially engaging activities, such as building relationships with consumers and audiences utilizing online, social platforms and taking a stand on social and political causes, which align brand and consumer values (Alcañiz et al., 2010). As a result, advertising industry norms today are teetering between historical and contemporary practices, which necessitates an understanding of, and a compromise between, historical commercial pursuits to garner a sale, and the contemporary social context wherein these exchanges take place. Indeed, today, more than ever, it is important that brands understand the values and beliefs of their audiences with whom they are interacting. In the case of Pepsi, the brand attempted to use a current, contentious social issue to, ultimately, sell soda. In addition, the advertisement engaged in a form of cultural appropriation, a clear paradigm violation according to actors inside and outside the industry. Finally, actors deemed the Jenner spot a form of brand activism, as Pepsi attempted to align with a cause. While the discourse analyzed allowed for brand activism as a practice potentially within normative boundaries, it did not believe Pepsi, a brand without a history of brand activism or a connection to this particular cause, could engage in the practice authentically. Effectively, for Pepsi or any brand that advocates for a cause, it should have some organic connection to the cause, otherwise consumers will see through the capitalistic ruse.
Therefore, brands need to think intentionally about their activism. This absolutely does not foreclose the possibility of brands using their economic and social capital to further positive change in the world. What it suggests is that these brands can do more harm than good if they fail to align their activism with their brand identity. For example, the shoe brand TOMS donates millions of shoes to people in need through their “One for One” promotion, a cause that fits within its brand identity (Roncha & Radclyffe-Thomas, 2016). As prior works illustrates, brands must have a “functional fit” with supported causes since “credibility plays a leading role in the means by which a company influences consumer response, by effectively deactivating consumers’ intuitive skepticism toward the firm” (Alcañiz et al., 2010, pp. 180–181). This is fundamentally the opposite of what occurred in the case of Pepsi, a brand with no prior connection to social justice generally or the Black Lives Matters movement specifically. Brands must be cognizant of this in the future or risk public dismissal.
In the case of this study, the decision by Pepsi to employ an in-house creative team clearly could have been avoided, something the discourse overwhelmingly dismissed as a short-sighted cost-saving technique that should never be utilized. Besides the use of an in-house creative team, discourse identified a second cause of the problem, a cause prevalent within all media industries: Actors argued that there is a lack of diversity within the entire advertising industry. They specifically noted the complete lack of diversity within the group that created the Jenner spot. Therefore, to avoid problems such as this in the future, it is fundamental for the industry to foster a diverse workforce.
Finally, the advertising industry must shift its professional culture to account for societal changes in terms of a brand's ability to control ownership over a message. More specifically, in a traditional advertising approach, audiences are intentionally targeted via one-directional, mass-mediated platforms such as television and radio. Therefore, brands maintained much of the control. Today, audiences are asked to interact with brands on social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Audiences can respond to the brand, share content within their network, like, retweet, and screenshot to preserve (and at times distort, e.g., memes) content. When intending to reach a specific audience, a brand must understand an audiences’ behaviors, beliefs and values including those of a specific generation, as well as the broader political and social contexts of the time. Regardless of the platform, a brand's content can breach this understanding. However, in a socially mediated environment, a breach – or a paradigm violation – can result in cacophony of voices from every side of the issue, from those intentionally reached (e.g., current or potential consumers) and others who simply have an opinion regarding any one of the relevant variables (e.g., current political context). And herein lies the challenge of brands attempting to take a stand. The response to the Pepsi ad blunder raises the importance of understanding professional culture. Effectively, Pepsi attempted to create an ad that would rise above the plethora of content available to, primarily, millennials. Pepsi wanted to reach this younger demographic and made an attempt to do so by hiring a well-known internet star. The brand then tried to create something controversial so it might stick out and, eventually, attract attention among the intended audience (i.e., those invested in the social cause of unity) to engage with the brand. Advertising agencies are typically hired to provide an outside perspective by conducting research on the audience, and aligning these insights with creative, at times by pushing the limits on a brand's identity or challenging the brand to see their product from the consumer's perspective and as situated within a relevant social context. Even those socialized into these professional norms will falter, so it is no wonder Pepsi failed as it tried to negotiate professional culture without this guidance.
In summation, Vos and Singer (2016) contended that studies of discourse surrounding one particular topic aspire to “modest empirical goals” (p. 149), and this study is no different. This piece, similar to other paradigm repair works or metadiscourse pieces, helps us illustrate some previously invisible norms at this moment. One clear limitation to the piece is that the data comes from only from trade magazines and mainstream periodicals. While this is similar to dozens of other similar studies, findings inevitably could be paired with a study focusing on discourse produced by those outside the advertising industry, such as commentors on social media. The boundaries of a field are determined primarily by insiders or those in the industry, which is why this study focuses on trade publications or mainstream articles quoting insiders, but outsiders also play a role and future work should incorporate those views. There is no doubt, for example, that social media discourse catalyzed Pepsi's quick decision to pull the advertisement (Handley, 2017). With that said, this study's contribution and value comes from a combination of the conclusions unearthed from the discourse, and, perhaps more importantly, the introduction of a different type of research into the scholarship surrounding advertising ethics. While codes of ethics exist, many of advertising's norms and ethics remain implicit and quasi-invisible, only made explicit after a paradigm violation occurs. This is why the approach taken here provides value to advertising ethics research. This study's findings should provide an argument for the utility of paradigm repair work in the study of advertising ethics. In many ways, we hope that this study catalyzes more work investigating how the advertising discursively negotiates boundaries of normative practice through published content.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
