Pepsi mentions up 7,000% as Kendall Jenner’s soft drink civic dispute solution stuns social media users
Soft drinks giant Pepsi has recieved a dramatically enlarged social media footprint of late as a result of its 'Jump In' ad - with one minor caveat - it is not for the right reasons.
Mention volume and sentiment towards Kendall Jenner's Pepsi ad
The company released a flagship ad for its global 'Live for Now Moments' campaign called ‘Jump In’, by Ogilvy New York, earlier in the week. It put, Kardashian influencer Kendall Jenner, front and centre, as she ‘gets woke’ and leads a protest that, after two minutes, culminates in the star offering a can of Pepsi to an armed police officer.
Having featured as The Drum’s Ad of the Day (you can vote for it here…), the creative quickly became a point of protest on social media with many users unhappy with the portrayal on civic disobedience on display. Accusations of it incorrectly reenacting the Black Lives Matters protests were widespread.
Social media analytics company Brandwatch kept a close eye on proceedings, it has revealed that Pepsi’s day-over-day social mentions were up by a massive 7,322% between 3-4 April. Furthermore on the 4 April the ad saw 427,000 mentions of Pepsi on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (and that’s no counting responses not mentioning the brand directly). By 4pm on Friday 5 April, mentions were up to 383,000.
The sentiment in particular was especially negative. On 30 March, the brand’s negativity index sat at around 23%. Today there’s a rate of 59.4%, almost up a third from the 30 March.
Once the sentiment is analysed word association can identify trends and emotions expressed towards the brand. They are as follows below.
Jenner’s also had a lot of negative feedback judging by her tweet publicising the video. She’s been mentioned in Pepsi conversations more than 236,000 times in the last week.
out now! @pepsi https://t.co/PBZmGhKQsR
— Kendall (@KendallJenner) April 4, 2017
Gemma Joyce, a Brandwatch social data journalist, said: "A brief glance at the conversation surrounding Pepsi's latest ad will tell you that it really has gone down badly.
"General mentions of Pepsi have rocketed 7,000%+ but sentiment towards them has plummeted with a lot of negative comments about the creators of the ad. Protest imagery, particularly given recent events, is a controversial move on Pepsi's part, and looking at the reaction from their audience it doesn't appear to have paid off."
On why there was such vitriol towards the campaign, you could do worse than read the musings of Andrew Eborn and Richard J. Hillgrove VI in their column 'Bang On': "Pepsi’s marketing department might be shaking their heads right now trying to work out why they’ve been trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons. The answer’s simple. Pepsi, you’re not the real thing."
Content created with:
Ogilvy & Mather New York
Find out more