Spokesperson fiasco #10: Ludacris for Pepsi

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

In a confrontation between bombast and street cred, Fox mouth Bill O'Reilly managed to rip the Pepsi (NYSE:PEP) bottle from rapper Ludacris's live, warm fingers. In August of 2002, O'Reilly, upset with the musician's street language and what he perceived as glorification of crime and misogyny, called for a boycott of Pepsi. At the time, Ludacris was a featured representative of Pepsi, no doubt part of the companies attempt to reach out to the 18-34 demographic.

After the company dumped Ludacris in response to the boycott, Pepsi immediately stepped back into a pile of controversy by signing the rock and brain-damage icon Ozzy Osbourne, he of bat-head biting-off fame. (Nothing goes better with bat than an ice-cold Pepsi.)

O'Reilly's diatribe helped call attention to the brutality of Lucacris's lyrics, not atypical for the genre but fear-inspiring to the Fox nation. For example:

"Hollow laid hollow sprayed I'm the hollow man
I get to my hollow point wit my hollow plan
Hollow bullets I pull it I'm about to live in vain
And then I drill em refill em make sure they feel the pain"

(BTW- Is this a shout-out to T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men?)

While the controversy cost Ludacris his Pepsi deal, O'Reilly was to swallow his tongue for a second time two years later when the rapper was signed by Anheuser-Busch (NYSE:BUD).

I don't see Bill O'Reilly pulling in big endorsement contracts these days. So who's your daddy now, Bill?

Read the entire series