Just days before Pepsi found itself at the center of one of the year’s biggest social media controversies, the company’s U.S. CMO, Mark Kirkham, was on stage at Cannes explaining why its marketing strategy had never been stronger.
Working alongside VaynerMedia, Pepsi had fundamentally changed the way it approached social media. Instead of pouring months into a handful of meticulously planned campaigns, the company had increased its content output fivefold, publishing hundreds of pieces of content every month. The strategy was simple: create more, experiment more, and stop pretending marketers can accurately predict what people will care about before they see it. Publish consistently, let consumers decide what resonates, and allow the platforms to surface the winners.
As I listened to the brief clip, I found myself agreeing with almost everything he said.
If you’ve read this newsletter for any length of time, you know I’ve been arguing that we’re living through the biggest shift in digital marketing since the rise of social media itself. The era of chasing clicks is fading, and brands are competing for attention inside feeds, AI summaries and recommendation engines where the content itself has become the destination. The companies that continue to treat social media as a distribution channel for polished advertising campaigns are losing ground to those that behave like publishers. They move faster, publish more often, and participate in culture instead of interrupting it.
Pepsi seemed to understand that better than almost anyone. Then the company published this:
I didn’t find it edgy or clever, I found it offensive, as did many others.
Whether Pepsi intended it as a “joke” about consent became irrelevant the moment it was published. Marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and neither does language. Once a brand releases something into the world, it no longer controls how that message is interpreted, it only controls whether it chose to publish it in the first place.
Like most people, I watched the backlash unfold in real time. Screenshots spread across Threads, X, LinkedIn and Reddit. Community Notes appeared. Comment sections filled with debates over whether people were overreacting or whether Pepsi had crossed a line. That conversation was predictable. We’ve all seen some version of it before.
What interested me wasn’t the outrage, it was the process.
I initially assumed this had been one unfortunate post. Then more screenshots from the broader Wild Cherry campaign began circulating, and a different picture emerged.
Over the previous several weeks, Pepsi had been steadily leaning into flirtation, dating culture, innuendo, and the language of internet relationships. The campaign wasn’t built around one questionable joke. It was built around a creative voice that kept pushing a little further each time, borrowing the tone and cadence of creator culture in an effort to sound more human, more conversational, and more native to social platforms.
Viewed individually, most of those posts weren’t especially controversial. Together, they revealed something more important. This wasn’t an isolated mistake, it was an editorial direction.
Creative work rarely goes off the rails all at once, it drifts. Every campaign develops its own internal logic. A joke lands well, so the next one pushes a little further. The audience responds, engagement grows, and confidence builds. Eventually, someone writes a line that feels perfectly consistent with everything that came before it. Inside the room, it makes sense because everyone has been on the same creative journey. Outside the room, millions of people encounter that single sentence without any of the context from the brainstorming sessions.
That’s exactly why this story matters, because Pepsi didn’t fail to review this post. It almost certainly reviewed it extensively.
Someone wrote it. Someone edited it. Someone at the agency approved it. Someone on the brand team signed off. Depending on the campaign, legal may have reviewed it as well. At every stage, another person had the opportunity to stop and ask the simplest question in marketing: How else could someone read this?
Apparently, nobody did. And while still holding them accountable, that’s what makes this bigger than Pepsi.
For years, we as marketers have been trying to solve a legitimate problem. Consumers have become exceptionally good at ignoring advertising, while social platforms increasingly reward content that feels like it belongs there. In response, brands have spent the better part of the last decade trying to sound less like corporations and more like creators. They’ve embraced memes, internet slang, trend participation and a faster publishing cadence. In many ways, that’s exactly the right evolution. The old model of carefully polished campaigns released once every quarter simply doesn’t match how people consume content anymore.
But somewhere along the way, many organizations copied the output without fully understanding the discipline behind it.
The best creators aren’t successful because they publish constantly, they’re successful because they’ve spent years developing editorial instincts. They know when a joke is likely to be misunderstood. They recognize when a line sounds funnier inside their own head than it will to an audience. They know when to delete a draft before anyone else ever sees it. Those instincts don’t come from brand guidelines or approval workflows, they come from experience, perspective and an acute understanding of audience.
Large organizations don’t develop instincts, they develop processes, and the two are not the same.
Processes are designed to ensure consistency. Editorial judgment exists to challenge assumptions. A process asks whether a post follows brand standards. Editorial judgment asks whether the audience is likely to hear something different than what the brand intended. Those questions overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
Newsrooms figured this out long ago.
An editor isn’t there to fix grammar or rewrite headlines, but to become the first reader. They’re the one person in the room who wasn’t present when the idea was born, which gives them something everyone else has lost: distance. They can spot ambiguity because they aren’t emotionally attached to the sentence and can identify unintended meanings because they haven’t spent three days debating what the writer meant.
As brands transform themselves into publishers, they’ve invested heavily in content studios, creator partnerships, AI tools and faster production workflows. What many haven’t invested in is the editorial layer that publishing has always required. They have creative directors, brand managers, and legal reviewers. Increasingly, they also need editors whose primary responsibility isn’t protecting the company from risk but protecting the work from being misunderstood before it ever reaches the public.
The irony is that I don’t think Pepsi’s overall strategy is wrong, I think it’s exactly where marketing is headed (for better or worse).
Brands do need to publish more, and do need to experiment. They do need to stop treating every social post like a multimillion-dollar television commercial. The future belongs to organizations that can think and act like publishers instead of advertisers.
But publishers have editors, and that’s the lesson I keep coming back to. In the rush to teach enterprise brands how to create like creators, we’ve forgotten to teach them how to edit like newsrooms.
Pepsi’s viral post wasn’t a failure of social media strategy, it was a failure of editorial judgment. In the year of our lord 2026, those two disciplines can no longer exist separately. The brands that thrive over the next decade won’t simply be the ones that publish the fastest or create the most content, they’ll be the ones who understand that moving at the speed of culture doesn’t eliminate the need for thoughtful editing.
Because the algorithm can decide what gets amplified, but it still can’t decide what deserves to be published in the first place.
Thanks as always for reading! 🙂
- Vincent