It occurs to me that if the Pepsi Cola corporation could get away with it, they would pluck out images from Tehran and use it in their current ad campaign (or the one for the past year) — the one which includes a hand reaching out past the smattering Berlin Wall, and a hippy drinking a can of Pepsi.

There isn’t too much historical legitimacy for the Berlin Wall Pepsi framing.  While the Cola War proponent of the of the Cold War had Pepsi signing its deal with the Soviet Union and swiftly flooding that emerging market, Coke made sure to stamp East Germany with the first bottling plant.  After all, Coca Cola was illegal in East Germany.  Which would have made it merely a subversive product, thrown over the wall during the Cold War:
Coca-Cola was deemed illegal by the East German authorities who considered it a “symbol of imperialist power”. The drinks company hit back in the Sixties by encouraging its managers to throw bottles of Coke over the Berlin Wall into the east.

Likewise, the problem for the hippy?  Pepsi was marketeted thoroughly squarishly back in the 1960s (even as it did its first iteration of their youth-focus for the baby boomers with the tagline “For those who think young”), and Richard Nixon was closely associated with the corporation.

But we’ll have to wait twenty years for Pepsi to ahistorically co-opt Iran’s Revolt, with a new variation of “Choice of a New Generation”.  In the meantime, it may be a good idea to they bring the Berlin Wall ads into heavier rotation for contemporary events synergy.

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