Pepsi Madam, when do you plan to launch the Atom in Japan?

It has been reported that PepsiCo is ‘betting’ Rs160 crore on this year’s IPL. A chunk of this expense is due to the making and dissemination of what must be the single most ignorantly insensitive advertisement in Indian media history.

By now, every Indian cricket-lover (and his/her lover) has seen the launch ads for Pepsi’s new product: the ‘Atom’, the ‘maximum impact’ fizzy drink. We would all have also noticed the digital rendition of the mushroom cloud that issues forth when a bottle of Atom is popped open. All of us have also heard the countdown during the ‘strategic’ timeouts… ‘4,3,2,1, Abhi!’

And some of us have asked: ‘WTF?’

This ad evokes something beyond its digitised images and the attendant sounds of a crowd waiting for the game to begin. The image has a history that either hasn’t been read — or has been deliberately ignored after reading. The latter is far worse, so let us give the advertising community of this country the benefit of doubt and say merely that they are not very literate or creative. (After all, they have a tradition of copying foreign ads ‘visuatim’.)

Do people under a mushroom cloud sip a cola after recovering from the excitement of having said ‘Abhi’?

I’m afraid not. They clutch on to the little bit of life that is left in them, the explosion taking away the best part of every breath. Its aftermath also robs a telling portion of the healthy lives of generations to come. When I saw the ads on television, the first questions I had were:

 What kind of dystopian comes up with an idea like this?

What kind of dystopian approves it?

What is the level of ignorance we are dealing with?

The answer to the first question is that an ad agency will come up with anything the client wants.

That is how business works. It is the approval that matters.

Deepika Warrier, vice-president PepsiCo, has been quoted as saying something completely non-nuclear: “It is good that the cola-wars are back”. Her primary concern was Coke’s predatory pricing (Rs 10 a bottle). The evocation of mass destruction is completely lost on this company.

The decision on the launch of Atom in a huge market like India had to have headquarters. And that is the office of Indra Nooyi, Padma Bhushan, chairperson and CEO, PepsiCo.

Nooyi is one of the most powerful corporate executives in the world and a source of immense pride for Emerging India. Her tenure at Pepsi has been nothing short of spectacular.

But so is a mushroom cloud. The next question I had when I saw the ad was addressed to her: ‘Madam, when do you plan to air the Atom ad in Japan’?

For the record, in the five years after the second week of August 1945, 3,40,000 people, or every second person in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, died.

‘Nuke ads’ have a history. In the 1964 US Presidential election, Lyndon Johnson’s side briefly aired the controversial ‘Daisy ad’. It went off the air because it portrayed a little girl (Daisy) being obliterated by a nuke. Johnson’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, had suggested (in equivocal terms) that pressing a button was an option, leaving the door open for an ad attack. But the controversial ads were pulled off air very quickly.

The Atom ads are different. They appear to be innocent of geopolitics. Here we are, nuke-armed, in multiple quarrels with neighbours who are also nuke-armed, and we merrily count down to mushroom clouds on entertainment television.

FYI, the elephant left the room a while back. A diplodocus, larger, apparently more benign and vegetarian, but with an alarmingly small brain, has just taken its place.

It doesn’t help that these are Pepsi ads. Pepsi’s R&D headquarters are in Valhalla — ‘hall of the slain’ in Norse mythology; home of the nerds at Pepsi. Its corporate headquarters are in a place called Purchase (need I say more?). Both towns are in New York.

Thing is, though, the ad could have just as easily been commissioned by Coke. The same agencies and attitudes are at play.

Google, however, provides enough material to inform that attitude. The official web site for the Nobel Prize says: “As he witnessed the spectacular explosion, Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had directed the scientific work on the bomb, remembered a line from the Vedic religious text Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” Oppenheimer had merely witnessed a ‘test’ explosion over the desolate wastes of New Mexico. In less than a month, those terrifying clouds would form over the people of Japan.

If mushroom clouds were a consequence of post-cola burps, the world would be a much safer place. But they aren’t. They have “maximum impact”.

So here is an appeal to friends who are making money off this ad — Shah Rukh, Vijay, Shilpa, Subroto, Rajiv, Srinivasan.. and wagera wagera… Take it off the air. Ms Nooyi is a Padma Bhushan, she will understand.

The writer is an author, journalist and consultant editor with dna.