It Took Thirty-Four Years to Admit America Is Actually Godless So That Madonna’s Pepsi Commercial Could be Embraced by the Company and Re-Aired on TV Again

In the final year of the still Reagan-dominated 80s, Madonna again “chose” (as if being inherently controversial to milquetoasts is a choice) to shock the world, but mainly the U.S., with the release of her video for “Like A Prayer.” As the lead single from her album of the same name, Madonna wanted to come right out of the gate with a song and visual that would set tongues wagging. Unfortunately for Pepsi (at the time), the offending visual coincided with the debut of her commercial for the brand, for which she was paid five million dollars (subsequently pocketing the cash despite the commercial airing all of twice in the United States). 

To really ramp up the hype surrounding the premiere of the commercial, there was even a teaser made for it. A commercial for a commercial. Something unheard of in the advertising world until someone as blockbuster-y as Madonna came along. And yes, the teaser does come across as even more retroactively condescending by showing a scene of someone “primitive” (complete with wearing little more than “tribal paint”) in something like an African setting (though it was probably just somewhere in L.A. County) ambling to the nearest ramshackle with a satellite. The commercial then flashes to impressionistic scenes of Madonna getting her makeup done as a man’s voice warns, “Sound check. Thirty seconds to air.” A “trailer voice” then comes on to announce over scenes of the “primitive” man intermixed with Madonna, “No matter where in the world you are, on March 2nd, get to a TV and watch as Pepsi Cola presents Madonna, singing her latest release, ‘Like A Prayer,’ for the very first time on the planet Earth.” As though she might have performed it on other planets beforehand. And if she did, they were likely more tolerant of the imagery presented in the video. 

Rather than being offended by the white savior-y elements, however, it was the “blasphemous” images of Madonna dancing defiantly in front of a bevy of giant burning crosses (KKK-style…except they like to brand it as the more euphemistic “cross lightings”) interspersed with her “canoodling” with a Black saint (played by Leon)—modeled after Saint Martin de Porres—that really sent conservatives into frothing-at-the-mouth overdrive. And since conservatives/Christians/Republicans were a key soda drinking demographic at the time (still are, in fact), Pepsi instantaneously capitulated to the furor surrounding “Like A Prayer” by pulling the commercial, ergo any ties they might have formerly had to Madonna. Not to mention effectively revoking the erstwhile pride they had about “landing” her.

Their sense of “being betrayed” when Madonna premiered the actual video the day (March 3rd) after the commercial first aired (during an episode of The Cosby Show no less) was confirmed when they released a statement assuring the masses that they had not seen the incendiary (no pun intended) contents of the video before the commercial went forward. And yet, considering this was Madonna (and that she was already well-known for being controversial by 1989), shouldn’t they have maybe suspected something “untoward” to crop up during their partnership with her? Or perhaps they wanted to believe that, by signing a contract together, Madonna would fall in line like a good corporate duckie doing her best to “positively” represent the brand. In that sense, Madonna’s attraction to the enterprise probably had roots in her father-daughter dynamic. With Tony Ciccone representing the strait-laced, “behave yourself” corporation, Madonna must have been titillated to rebel against a new kind of patriarchal entity. To that point, the fact that the commercial focuses on a then present-day Madonna looking back at footage of her eighth birthday only adds to her self-infantilization in such a way as to be “scolded” by her “corporation daddy.” And she surely didn’t mind all the media attention that came with her “punishment.” Which was, ultimately, a lot of free publicity that only drew more attention to the song and album (as M phrased it before all the hullabaloo went down, “The Pepsi spot is a great and different way to expose the record. Record companies just don’t have the money to finance that kind of publicity”). And as Grown-Up Madonna sits alone in a classroom or dances in the halls of a stern, Catholic-esque school among the other children, it’s apparent she’s still stuck in that part of her past where she was first emotionally wounded. Which is a lot for a commercial about soda. 

In this and so many other regards, it was a wonder that Pepsi greenlit the ad at all. Even without the eventual bad blood that arose when she “undermined” their collab with the “Like A Prayer” video. Tod MacKenzie, the spokesperson for Pepsi and its dealings with Madonna at the time, had even initially said of the partnership that they weren’t worried about M’s reputation for “rabble-rousing.” This evident in his statement, “Her appeal is in her music and her acting. That’s where people’s interests are.” But no, alas, that’s not what the people’s interests were once the religious right found they could come for Madonna’s endorsement deal by calling her out as a heathen. Even though what they should have been commenting on was her continued display of a keen business acumen. After all, this was the first time any musician had even premiered a previously unreleased song in a commercial. Although such “synergy” is commonplace now, Madonna, once again, blazed the trail for it to be so. And yes, also seemed to want to prove Andy Warhol’s uber-capitalistic adage that, “Good business is the best art” (on a side note, Madonna was quoted as saying something similar before the ad came out: “​​I like the challenge of merging art and commerce”). Yet if one were to ask Pepsi in 1989 if Madonna was doing “good business,” the company likely would have answered with a resounding no. For not only did she undo her promise to partner with them for a year’s worth of ad campaigns, but she also effectively repelled them from sponsoring what would have been the Like A Prayer Tour, slated to kick off in 1989. Instead, without Pepsi to bog her down with outraged input, she embarked on the envelope-pushing Blond Ambition Tour in 1990. So, in the end, Pepsi distancing itself from Madonna was the best for the latter’s artistic integrity (as she kept referring to it in Truth or Dare). 

Over the next few decades, Madonna would continue to offer her “services” to middle-of-the-road corporations and their ad campaigns, including Gap, Motorola (where she also premiered a snippet of “Hung Up” for the first time) and H&M. By then, of course, “tastes” had changed enough (though not enough to evade having a second Bush as president) to allow for the types of controversies that Madonna had desensitized the masses to. And yet, she never did anything as inflammatory (again, no pun intended) as she did by making her “Like A Prayer” video synonymous with Pepsi. Even in 2003, the year of the Gap commercial, her offending version of the “American Life” video was censored by the star herself, deciding to pull it out of respect for “the troops” once war in Iraq was all but assured. Though perhaps, in the moment, airing the original would have put a pin in her Gap ad plans, what with the idea of maligning Bush in 2003 still being “unthinkable” for many, especially conservatives. 

Even in today’s climate, corporations have their limits for what they’ll tolerate if they’re going to stand by a controversial spokesperson. Ye was a prime example of that with both Gap and adidas. But if someone (read: a woman) like Madonna had displayed even a hint of any of his antics, they would have been “kiboshed” far sooner. That said, there have been just as many “heretical” men in music (including Madonna contemporaries Prince and Michael Jackson, who had his own Pepsi campaign in 1984), it just so happened that Madonna “went too far” as a woman. Pushing buttons and challenging taboos in a way that no pop musician (of any gender) had ever done before. And yet, Pepsi felt obliged to cave to the pressures of pearl-clutching religious groups (of the sort that would have burned Beatles albums when John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” quote was taken out of context) threatening to boycott the brand. That’s when Pepsi really decided, “Oh fuck, we got in bed with the devil.” For there is no one more satanic to a capitalist than somebody who threatens the fullness of their bag. So it was that the same spokesperson who claimed that Madonna’s “appeal is in her music and her acting. That’s where people’s interests are” was quick to counteract that defense of working with the button-pushing pop star by finally announcing, one month after the original air date of the commercial, “​​When you’ve got an ad that confuses people or concerns people, it just makes sense that that ad goes away.” In truth, “it just made sense” for the ad to “go away” because it was hurting their brand, ergo their coffers. 

Madonna herself knew the risks of getting involved with any entity imprisoned to shareholders, foreshadowing the botched business relationship by saying in Rolling Stone, “…the treatment for the video is a lot more controversial. It’s probably going to touch a lot of nerves in a lot of people. And the treatment for the commercial is…I mean, it’s a commercial. It’s very, very sweet. It’s very sentimental.” But that didn’t matter to the public once the music video was released. They could no longer separate “Like A Prayer” the video from “Like A Prayer” the commercial. Which just goes to show how daft Pepsi drinkers are, one supposes. 

Nonetheless, it hasn’t stopped Pepsi from securing the most au courant musicians in pop over the years. From Spice Girls to Britney Spears. These being just some of the artists whose “vintage” Pepsi commercials will be aired during the 2023 MTV VMAs on September 12th as part of a commemoration of its one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary. And yes, they’re digging Madonna’s “Make A Wish” commercial out of the vault for it, too. A sign of “bygones being bygones,” even if it’s unlikely that Madonna will be “touched” by her sudden corporate acceptance (Pepsi even had the balls to take some kind of credit for Madonna’s commotion-causing by writing, “Cheers to disrupting the status quo”—as though they had any part in doing that when “Like A Prayer” came out). Besides, she is her own corporation anyway. Thus, one of her frequent sayings while recording in the 80s being, “Time is money, and the money is mine.” As it still was even after Pepsi reneged on their deal. 

With tag lines shown at the end of the commercial that included both “A Generation Ahead” and “A Taste of America,” Pepsi proved itself to be a generation behind on having the so-called gumption to keep the Madonna ad running, as well as a taste of America in every way, hypocrisy-wise. For while the country loves to spout how it’s a God-loving/-fearing place founded on Christian ideals, all of that posturing is belied by godless behavior. At least now, finally airing the Pepsi commercial on TV again is a major step in admitting to that godlessness.