Faking it

Gawker had a terrific post today about the gobbledygook a branding agency put together to sell Pepsi on what looks like a slight tweaking of the Pepsi logo. I have been, in my day, a leading practitioner of bullshit, and I must say I admire this work.



This is really just the tip of the iceberg, viz:



And my personal favorite, as it both honors and mocks the taste for popular distortions of relativity and quantum mechanics:



There's much, much more of this. It's really a masterwork of the genre, and I think every over-bright, under-ambitious college student should have a look before they get too full of themselves for getting away with shit.

The beauty part is that this ultimately wasn't about the branding company justifying themselves, so much as the dopes at Pepsi who paid for the logo and will pay, apparently, hundreds of millions of dollars to substitute it for the old one, also paying for the justification, which takes them off the hook. It's a perfect example of a situation in which no one will call bullshit because it's in everyone's mutual interest to go on pretending this isn't absurd.

If only the branders had fun doing this, and thought they were pulling a fast one. Sadly, I'm sure they were dead serious.