Apparently, the past couple weeks have not been good weeks for our top cola manufacturers. Coca-Cola recently had its incident with a Vitamin Water cap that had a questionable (to say the least) phrase printed on it, and now their rival Pepsi-Cola has had a small issue of its own with a recent print ad. Nothing was out of the ordinary when Pepsi decided to partner up in an ad campaign with a Japanese clothes retailer called "A Bathing Ape" that was promoting a line of clothing called AAPE. However, due to a poor choice of font, some rather large ads promoting these two products appear at first glance to read "Pepsi x Rape."
Predictably, a spokesperson for the company has apologized to anyone who was offended and promised not to use said design in the future, and of course it's hard to imagine there's a real reason to be offended here as it was clearly a mistake on the company's part. However, one has to question how this advertisement actually got this far with no one realizing the problem with it. Of course, once it was released Reddit was all too quick to notice the problem, as one might expect.
Obviously, Pepsi-Cola was right to apologize for their mistake and not to use this design in the future, and it's sort of doubtful this will be any huge PR crisis for them (it certainly doesn't deserve to be). However, this is certainly quite a failure in advertisement design, and is even more inexplicable than Coca-Cola's failure to realize that perhaps pairing an English word with a French one could result in some bad combinations. Overall, it's hard to believe any serious harm was done even if it's a bit hard to comprehend how no one could have noticed the flaw in the ad.
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