Posted 4:53 PM by Gene

On the same day Amazon.com announces it's ditching ads, PepsiCo, that charter member of the American Society of Willfully Ignorant Advertisers and former supporter of Hezbollah TV, announces it's throwing money at AOL for a glorified sweepstakes. They're betting the news hacks will help; they will. (With that headline, they already have.) I wouldn't be too sure with those insurance companies. They have a little more sense.

Of course Pepsi has a long history of embarrassments in advertising, from Wacko's 'do to The Man baiting Catholics to that hip hop star it's had to drop because of his lyrics. We'll give the bozos in Purchase the benefit of the doubt; it was that "John Peel" jingle played endlessly on the radio ("Pepsi-Cola hits the spot!") that turned a company with a very shady past into a titan of beverages. The Pepsi Generation (another famous campaign with another famous jingle) sealed it. But the ad biz can't write good campaigns or jingles anymore; and after so many years of bad TV people have a very different attitude toward advertising, and it's not warm and fuzzy. The Hezbollah fiasco underlines it: Advertising, like so much of modern America, is a self-justifying mechanism with no useful purpose. And PepsiCo still swears allegiance to it.