The chorus of boo’s is making it all too easy to join the backlash against Pepsi for their new iPhone app, which encourages users to ‘amp up before they score’. I think I’m obligated by law now to tell you that I have tried Amp before and I do agree that the application is in poor taste, but while on the subject of poor taste, has anyone actually tried Amp’d? Its the caustic, Mountain Dew equivalent to Red Bull, or something.
Now lets just get this out of the way, there are plenty of products out there that are in poor taste. Being vocal is your tongue/vocal chord given right, but honestly, isn’t Play Boy or UFC more deserving of hostility? Sure it’s crass and low-brow, but you don’t have to download it, or be typified into one of the 24 categories used to define ‘you’.
Perhaps we should take a time machine back and stage protests over the objectification of men in a classic diet coke ad. Or demand that the angel in the Philadelphia cream cheese commercials stops having ‘man-servants’. Or that the show Keys to the VIP be banished from television. But we won’t go there.
Where we will go, is to a tired cycle of complaining that really just reiterates your power as a consumer, so if you don’t like it: don’t use it. The amount of publicity that this has drummed up for Amp will probably be quite beneficial to the product and the application, because it interests the exact user that this backlash is trying to be bitter towards: guys who like to laugh at dumb jokes. Oh no, that ogling, drooling neanderthal with no social skills just read some words on a screen and is now going to hit on me? Boo hoo. I’m pretty sure, as one of the official sponsors of the Major League Gaming, the app and the beverage will be a hit where it matters.
I think this matter of objectification, or disrespect, is already available, just in a different package. Remember the Axe Game Killers campaign? Or perhaps almost every Axe campaign that follows a similar theme or spraying yourself with some potion that makes women weak in the knees and chase you with murderous lust.
We are inundated by expectations and roles in advertising, but do people honestly buy into it? To me its all a good ribbing and if you can’t take it, don’t give it. Every time I log on Facebook, I’m being told to go from scrawny to brawny and apparently all women on the site just want to shop for cheap Ugg boots. So if you really buy into this supposed role, then by all means, keep waving your magic wand of righteousness and complain. But its getting trite and kind of sad to watch.
If you are actually bland enough to be “studied up quickly with a cheat sheet on the stuff she’s into, with lists, links and some surefire opening lines,” then my keyboard gently weeps for you. The functionality of the application could just as easily be employed by a woman to keep a “Brag List.” The popular female-focused blog Jezebel called it “unacceptable and ridiculously offensive.” Perhaps there should be a boys only section in the app store.
I think the #pepsifail hashtag is hilarious and truly believe that they have done an admirable job of managing the crisis, but pulling the application should not even be a consideration. With a precedent like that I might have to give back my copy of Grand Theft Auto 4, in which I kill and sleep with people, and that is just not going to happen.
When an unremarkable app gets such an enormous promotional boost by massive amounts of naivete, it becomes a spectacle which I can only observe with my palm pressed to my forehead while rocking my head slowly from left to right. I don’t mean to offend anyone but people have gotten way too politically correct, boring and humorless. To those offended, I do not see it your way, but you certainly have a right to be. Let me know what bothers you the most about the application.
