Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner Ad: The Failure of Ethos in Protest

In 2017, Pepsi released a commercial showing Kendall Jenner leaving a photo shoot to join a generic street protest, where she hands a can of soda to a police officer and everyone cheers as if she has solved social tension with carbonation. The ad vanished within twenty-four hours after widespread backlash, but it left behind a textbook case of how a brand can destroy its credibility by misreading the cultural moment. What made the Jenner ad so offensive was not just its tone-deaf message but its complete failure of ethos: Pepsi tried to borrow the moral authority of real protest movements without understanding them, using a wealthy model with no activist background to play-act resistance.

The result showed why ethos, the rhetorical appeal based on credibility and character, cannot be faked or purchased, especially when dealing with subjects as serious as racial justice and police violence.

Ethos is one of three classical modes of persuasion identified by Aristotle, alongside logos (logical reasoning) and pathos (emotional appeal). A speaker or brand builds ethos through demonstrated expertise, shared values, or consistent behavior over time. In advertising, companies often try to construct ethos by associating themselves with trusted figures or causes, hoping that credibility transfers from one to the other. Pepsi had run successful campaigns before by aligning with music and youth culture, but those efforts stayed within the safe territory of entertainment. The Jenner ad attempted something far more ambitious and dangerous: it tried to position Pepsi as a participant in social justice movements that were responding to real grief and anger over police shootings. The company seemed to believe that vague imagery of diverse young people holding signs would be enough to earn trust, but ethos requires substance, not just aesthetics.

The ad failed because Pepsi had done nothing to establish credibility on issues of justice or protest. The commercial aired just years after the Black Lives Matter movement had grown in response to killings like those of Michael Brown and Philando Castile, and images of protesters facing armed officers in Ferguson and other cities were still fresh. Pepsi inserted itself into that reality with no history of supporting those causes, no partnerships with affected communities, and no acknowledgment of the actual stakes involved. Instead, the company offered a sanitized fantasy where protest looks like a block party and tension dissolves with a sugary drink. Real activists had been arrested, tear-gassed, and beaten while demonstrating; Jenner's character faced no risk and solved no real problem. The gap between Pepsi's manufactured ethos and the earned authority of actual movements could not have been wider, and viewers recognized the dishonesty immediately.

Choosing Kendall Jenner as the face of the ad compounded the ethos problem. Jenner is a successful model and media personality, but she had no public record of activism or engagement with social justice issues at the time. Casting her suggested that Pepsi thought protest was a matter of star power rather than lived experience and moral commitment. The ad even showed her abandoning a glamorous photo shoot to join the march, as if activism were just another accessory she could pick up when it suited her image. This trivialized the work of organizers and protesters who had spent years building movements, often at great personal cost. Ethos depends on the audience believing the speaker has genuine investment in the subject, and Jenner's presence communicated the opposite: that protest could be performed by anyone with enough visibility, regardless of their connection to the cause. The choice revealed how little Pepsi understood about where credibility comes from.

Some defenders of the ad argued that Pepsi was simply trying to promote unity and positivity, and that critics were being too harsh on a brand attempting to join a cultural conversation. There is something to the idea that companies should be allowed to take risks and make mistakes without being destroyed for them, and Pepsi did pull the ad quickly and apologize. However, this counterargument misses the point that ethos is not about intention but about perception and reality. A brand does not get credit for trying to do good if it demonstrates ignorance or disrespect in the process. Pepsi was not just clumsy; it co-opted the language and imagery of movements born from trauma and used them to sell soda. That is not a minor misstep but a fundamental misunderstanding of how trust and authority work, and the speed of the backlash reflected how seriously people take the integrity of protests that matter to them.

The Jenner ad remains a case study in how ethos cannot be borrowed or manufactured through surface-level association. Pepsi learned that credibility on serious social issues requires years of authentic engagement, not a two-minute commercial with attractive people holding blank signs. The failure shows that audiences are more sophisticated than advertisers sometimes assume, especially when it comes to distinguishing between real moral authority and corporate performance. For anyone studying persuasion, the lesson is clear: ethos is fragile, built slowly through consistency and honesty, and destroyed quickly by opportunism. Pepsi wanted to seem relevant and socially conscious, but instead it became a symbol of what happens when a brand tries to profit from struggle without earning the right to speak about it.

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