Whether Kendall Jenner is complicit in the now-pulled Pepsi ad that invoked images of Black Lives Matter protests became a topic of debate after Pepsi apologized to the celebrity.
Jenner, a popular model and a member of the media-savvy Kardashian family with mother-manager Kris Jenner, was the star of the ill-fated Pepsi commercial that received wide scorn on social media this week.
Jenner appears in the nearly three-minute video, leaving a photo shoot and shedding her blond wig and lipstick to join the protesters and give a police officer a Pepsi.
By Wednesday, 58.6 percent of the 1.25 million mentions on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, was negative, according to social media monitoring company Brandwatch, noted Ad Age magazine.
Conversations about Jenner's complicity in the failed commercial deepened when Pepsi issued an apology Wednesday, including Jenner in the people who had been wronged in the ads.
"Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding," Pepsi wrote Wednesday in a statement, according to The Washington Post. "Clearly, we missed the mark and apologize. We are pulling the content and halting any further rollout. We also apologize for putting Kendall Jenner in this position."
The apology to Jenner brought a new round of criticism for Pepsi and the model.
"Pepsi does not actually care about the righteous rage displayed on the Internet or in these streets during protests," stated Essence magazine writer Aurielle Marie Lucier. "Why else would they apologize to Jenner, a woman complicit in their violent erasure of our bodies, and not to us?"
Eric Schiffer, chief executive of Reputation Management Consultants, told USA Today that the Jenner is a big enough star to have known what was coming and could have said "no" to the job.
"There are photo boards of all these commercials, so they know exactly what’s going to happen," Schiffer told USA Today. "They did not enter into this in naïve fashion, it was a giant miscalculation that reared its ugly soda head on the Kardashians...This is a case when content slapped them in the face."
Eric Dezenhall, a Washington, D.C. crisis manager, though, was willing to give Jenner and her team the benefit of the doubt, wrote USA Today.
"In all likelihood Jenner thought this would be a warm and fuzzy spot with a politically correct message so no one on her team could necessarily envision the blowback," Denzenhall told USA Today. "Her job was to show up and look good and she did that. Given that the Jenner brand is visibility and that it's not tied too much beyond that I don't think this is a serious setback."
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