Be Excellent To Each Other

An internal document from Pepsi that beggars belief.

http://bunnitude.com/misc/files/pepsi_gravitational_field.pdf

The people who sit around all day making that crap up need to be deported to Siberia frankly. It was bad enough I spent one day last week locked in a room with people going on about "first touch experience" when what they meant to say was "fabric conditioner makes your washing softer".

Not since the court order

But yes, I get increasingly annoyed by people using vacuous language. I once re-read an email sent to everyone at work six times because I did not understand what it was trying to say.

Then again, as Jamie Whyte in 'Bad Thoughts'* points out, if you're paying thousands of pounds for consultants, you too would be miffed if the report said 'cut costs; raise income'


* Read it. Give it to friends. Read it again. It's brilliant.

Warning: this will break the Pepsi logo for you and it will be all you see everytime it catches your eye.

Didn't our very own Mr Chris used to be the person that said "no, fuck off, you can't say that" to ad men?

PepsiCo marketing is absolutely losing it, as also evidenced by the recent, dreadful Tropicana rebrand. Ugh.

EDIT: And, man, if that's true, that's an awful lot of justification for a truly appalling and shitty logo. It's a shame the CEO didn't read that document, say "Actually, the 1970s logo was a lot better—let's just use that one again", and scrap the new one.

surely that whole document is a wind-up? No?

Christ. I love the 'typical shopping aisle' picture. Person with straight line pointing away from them.

Apparently, Pepsi has a gravitational pull. Hmmm.

Indeed I did. I once, for the good of mankind, requested (very politely, mind you) that they stopped using Andy McChuffingDowell on those L'Oréal Paris adverts, but I was overridden. Disgraceful.

YOU SHOULD HAVE TRIED HARDER. FOR THE WORLD.

I was firmly reminded that my remit ran only to legal and evidential issues, not the stylistic.

I reminded them of their reminder when they started noticing that I wasn't fixing their typos for them any longer. Marketeers and ad-persons are generally not well educated in the correct use of the english language.

Awesome.

The older branding is far nicer. All the money mega-corps spend on these design abortions is for tax breaks right?

I like the way their carefully crafted justification for the new logo goes against the trend of 'less curves in every iteration'.

Bah! Pepsi is muck anyway

You may have just become Mrs. Rodafowa's new hero. There are no words for how much she hates Andie McDowell for those adverts. It's near pathological.

Mrs Chris has a similarly epic hatred of her.

I think L'Oréal's reasoning may have been that as if they stopped using Andy McDowell she would have no income and would be homeless, it was a form of charity and therefore tax deductible.

Mrs The Rev Owen also hates her and her adverts.

That was my first thought! By the ad agency, to Pepsico.

Either that or whoever wrote it was actually on acid at the time.

In an industry which gave the Office of Government Commerce the below logo, I can well believe it's all true.

Haha, I just checked that. It's different now.

Ha Ha! I forgot about the recumbent wanker logo.

Remember how the AA used to use the tagline "The 4th Emergency Service"?

Not any more they don't.

You're welcome.

Have you considered the possibility that this PDF has been leaked intentionally to get everyone talking about Pepsi? I mean, it can't be real can it?

Yeah it's like that complaint letter sent to Richard Branson a few weeks ago which was just fairytales

Be fair, there is a lot of work gone into that document. It doesn't make a gnat's bollock of sense, but a lot of circles have been drawn, and that can't be bad.

I've only just looked through it and I can see the sense in the design, but it's almost lost in a sea of conceptual concentric nonsense, but as others have said, if you're being paid $50m for a corporate redesign of a brand that is about 100x more valuable than the entire stock of the product it reps, then you're almost obliged to SING for your supper, even if you don't know the words

The Independent contacted Virgin Atlantic's PR department, who confirmed the letter was genuine and Richard Branson had spoken to the author on the phone.

Do go on.

Or, indeed, in anything.

That's not entirely fair. Some of the marketing people at L'Oréal were very attractive indeed quite bright.

They had access to Horseface McDowal (I'd look up the spelling, but then I'd have to care) and didn't push her down the stairs. This fact starkly contradicts your claim.

MacDowell was imposed on us all by the Americans and their allies in the Paris head office.

And they were indeed startlingly attractive intelligent.

I wish to refer my learned friend, at this point, to the post he made on the "I've gotten sick of my bird and want to knob the lass in the office" and compare, and contrast the sentiments he thought I express, in his reply, when he said "I thought it was MaliA" causing friction, approaching greatness at Mali towers.

He's gone again. CAN SOMEONE WIGGLE MALI'S CABLE, PLEASE? Thankyou.

Stop ruining my fun.

They (the AA) really pissed me off about something, can't remember what it was now. But anyway, the advert came on "We're the 4th Emergency Service" and as a petty act of revenge, I put a complaint into the ASA, saying that the Lifeboats and Coastguard are the 4th Emergency Service.

A short while later, the adverts stayed the same but tagline was changed to "To our members, we're the 4th Emergency Service". The ASA wrote back and said that the AA would not use that phrase in any future advert campaigns.

I was tempted to complain about other stuff, but I figured I was turning into Angry of Tunbridge Wells.

Once, in the final of Pat Sharpe's funhouse the final question was 'name three emergency services' to which the poor kid answered 'fire, ambulance, AA', losing everything.

I actually felt a little sorry for him, feeling like he had been a little misled by the adverts. I laughed quite a lot too though.

Nice one, Plissken. I heartily applaude.

Hang on, has no one called Mr C on Americans allied with France?! This could never happen.

The French had a wonderful habit of sending French people over to run all of their regional divisions. They do not trust the locals to manage themselves. I feel it is perhaps a rather childish expression of frustration at the loss of what passed for their empire.