Breathtaking

From Advertising Age:

"Over the past 24 hours, adland has been abuzz about 'Breathtaking,' a 27-page document purported to be the thinking behind Arnell Group's recent revamping of Pepsi-Cola's logo. Littered as it is with marketing jargon, images of yin-yangs, mobius strips and Da Vinci's Vitruvian man, you'll maybe wonder whether Michael Phelps wasn't the only one hitting that bong."

This is beautiful. The creative process is a many splendored and mystical thing, but if the end result is dumb, it may have been a waste of time. I hate the new Pepsi logo. Twenty-seven pages to justify tipping the old logo on its side? I think it looks lop-sided and sloppy. It’s asymmetry at its awkward worst.

But is the document real, or an advertising hoax? Read it in PDF form here. It's embarrassing to see "Pepsi Introduces Breathtaking" on a timeline that includes Euclid, Pythagorus and Descartes. This can't be real. If this is what it looks like -- a tremendously arrogant ad man's sketchbook -- then it's sad that it got out.

Maybe that's exactly what it is. Here's Ad Age's Rupal Parekh on that ad man, Peter Arnell, the head of the Arnell Group:

"Consider this is the same person who just last month compared a 3-D Super Bowl spot created by his agency to as historic a moment as Thomas Edison's invention of motion pictures. Of course, then there's this:

'When I did the Pepsi logo, I told Pepsi that I wanted to go to Asia, to China and Japan, for a month and tuck myself away and just design it and study it and create it,' Mr. Arnell said earlier to Ad Age. 'There was a lot of research, a lot of consumer data points ... and dialogue that I had with the folks at Pepsi, consumers and retailers. We knew what we were doing.'"

Then again, Charles Rosen of the ad agency Amalgamated said to Ad Age: "Anyone who has ever spent any time in the halls of Pepsi would sympathize with Peter."