In 2017, Kendall Jenner starred in a Pepsi commercial that was pulled soon after its premiere due to criticism that it trivialized the Black Lives Matter movement. More recently, Kendall Jenner was spotted at a New York City bodega sipping on Pepsi's biggest competitor and the photos are causing their own stir online. They actually have people wondering is this a new kind of ad?
Yesterday, Kendall Jenner popped into a bodega wearing as glamorous an outfit as any New York City corner store has ever seen. While there, she bought a can of the newly-released Orange Vanilla Coke. Due to the fact that Jenner was wearing an orange dress that matched the Coke can suspiciously well, internet users began hypothesizing that this might be an advertising scheme.
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The Instagram account Diet Prada, who is known for trying to keep the fashion industry honest, shared a few of the paparazzi photos taken of Jenner on this strangely fancy soda run, along with clips of all the sites that covered her outing, and a screenshot of Jenner's own shot of herself buying the drink. Accompanying the images, Diet Prada raised the question, "Was this color harmony a coincidence or have Jenner and Coca-Cola been scheming to skirt around the FTC’s social media advertising guidelines?"
To find out more, we reached out to Coca-Cola to see if there was an undisclosed partnership between the company and the supermodel. To our surprise, it turns out, Coke did not pay Kendall.
"Kendall Jenner is not paid by Coca-Cola and this was not a paid placement. There is nothing better than drinking an ice-cold Coke in the summer and clearly Kendall agrees!" a Coca-Cola spokeswoman told Refinery29 via email this morning. So there you have it.
When we really think about it, it's not that hard to believe that Jenner saw a can of Coke that matched her dress and decided to buy it. She is, after all, a millennial, which makes it tough to resist the potential Instagrammable moment. Since she also purchased a pack of Nutella & Go at the bodega, perhaps she really did just want a snack. Plus, we're guessing it might be quite a while before she teams up with another cola brand.