The time is 2017. In a time of political unrest, the Black Lives Matter movement took shape following the tragic killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. Professional football players like Colin Kaepernick began taking a knee instead of standing for the national anthem, a stance that split Americans between those who saw it as appallingly unpatriotic and those who viewed it as a symbol of a society that had failed one of its most vulnerable groups.
To say the least, the last thing anybody wanted was Kylie Jenner handing them a Pepsi.
The infamous promo aired in 2017 as part of Pepsi’s “Live for Now” campaign. In it, Kylie Jenner joins a group of protesters approaching a police barricade. She hands one of the officers an ice-cold, refreshing Pepsi, which he drinks with gusto and smiles. The crowd of protesters cheers as Kylie Jenner and a can of Pepsi have apparently just solved racism.
The ad ran for exactly one day before being pulled down, with Pepsi immediately issuing an apology for its tone-deaf approach to a complicated subject matter. However, the ad had an unexpected side effect. Out of nowhere, Sony’s long-discontinued PlayStation Portable started trending on Twitter, four years after the console ended production.
The source of this rise in attention was a call to action on Twitter to point out problematic advertising, with the Sony PSP being called out for a particularly… interesting ad from 2006. Take a look at the picture below, and you can probably guess why.
The print and billboard campaign featured images of a white woman grabbing a Black woman by her face or throat, with the white woman in an aggressive and powerful stance while the Black woman was in a submissive position. The Black woman’s nearly all black-clothing and facial features blended into the black background, while the white woman and her white outfit stood out starkly against the background color. The ad was accompanied by the words “White is coming”.
The ad was meant to convey that the PlayStation Portable, previously only available in black, was getting a new color variation. A slick-looking all white console (which I can personally confirm had a bad habit of discoloring rather quickly).
At the time, social media wasn’t quite as prominent as it is today, and the ad only ran in the Netherlands, the product of a local marketing affiliate with little oversight from the corporate arm of Sony. Despite this, local groups protested the ad, and it was quickly removed from circulation alongside an apology from both Sony and the ad affiliate that had created the campaign. The apology emphasized that current racial politics were only an issue in the US, and that people in the Netherlands were not as impacted by the imagery as people in other Western countries might be. Sony also issued a follow-up claiming that there were several variations of the ad that showed the Black woman in the power position, choking the white woman instead.
The incident was quietly forgotten about until Kylie Jenner and her stupid Pepsi ad brought the issue to the limelight again, and now in the age of Twitter and other social media platforms, we can all enjoy another abysmal Sony marketing ploy, one that stands alongside other Sony wins such as asking journalists to eat offal out of goat carcass to promote God of War just two years prior.