Scientists today discovered a new fundamental interaction. “Pepsitavity.”

Scientists working for Pepsico expended $1.2 Billion dollars to track down and harness this force of nature. Pepsitavity will power your cars, heat your homes, cook your food and induce you to drink buckets and buckets of Pepsi:

Illustration of Pepsitavity

This is one of innumerable hilarious and seemingly earnest and sincere illustrations in an internal document leaked from the Peter Arnell Agency which was commissioned to redesign the Pepsi logo and branding schemes.

Their efforts are at best amateurish, my first reaction to seeing the logo in the wild was “printing error” and if they believed one word of that document it’s not hard to see why, it starts out silly then by the fifth or sixth page enters the realm of Scott Adams and finally, by the last page has progressed into open farce.

When your ad agency confuses your company’s logo with any of…

1. The Sun
2. The Mona Lisa
3. The Parthanon
4. The Universe
5. The Chambered Nautilus

…you are in trouble. When your ad agency confuses your logo with all of these, in one document, they’re on weed… and you’re very in trouble.

This document is easily the most screamingly, patently ludicrous thing I have ever read, worse, portions of it are positively ungrammatical. Pepsico shareholders must be screaming “You spent $1.2 Billion for THIS????”. Breathtaking arrogance and transparent cluelessness rarely go down well with your investors, particularly when you’ve just spent more than the GDP of a small country to obtain them.

What’s worse, the same agency was hired to wreck the branding for Sierra Mist, Mountain Dew and Tropicana, which it did admirably, I could recreate the Sierra Mist logo by applying a blur filter on the word “mist” in Photoshop… plus I would have charged them ten bucks.

The new Sierra Mist Logotype

The re-brands of Mountain Dew (sacrilegiously renamed “MTN DEW”) and Tropicana went over equally well. Enraged customers have forced Pepsico to abandon the new Tropicana branding and return to the venerable “orange with a straw sticking out of it”. That’s a very expensive mistake folks.

You should definitely take a look at the PDF. It’s priceless and mostly pictures so it’ll take five minutes.

The lesson to be learned from all of this is twofold. 1) Messing with the heritage of a legendary brand is a BAAAAD idea and 2) When in the market for a new branding agency, bring a drug sniffing dog.