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Does “your agency hate black women”?
An aspiring junior copywriter uses the controversial Pepsi ad with Kendall Jenner and a letter to make ad agencies sit up and take notice.
Alycia Lewis is an aspiring copywriter, who recently graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology. In a Facebook job group, she shared a cover letter that starts off with a telling salvo: “Your Agency Hates Black Women”.
The post, which is an ad for herself, also admonishes ad agencies and the industry for being “echo chambers of ass patting and cigar smoking.” The Pepsi ad Lewis refers to has been accused of trivialising the seriousness of an issue. Pepsi was blamed of being tone-deaf by using an able bodied white woman (Jenner) who – during a protest march in the street - uses a can of Pepsi that she offers to a police officer to bring normalcy. Almost everybody protested the trivialisation - how unrealistic it was to expect a can of the drink could solve all of the problems on the street.
Lewis uses Pepsi’s ‘protest blunder’ quite effectively in this attention-grabbing cover letter for a job.