After Pepsi released its ad out into the world, many social-media reactions were tongue-in-cheek offers from non-advertising-experts to “consult” for Pepsi, by reviewing its ads and telling the company which ones are offensive. I asked Schuyler Vanden Bergh, the creative director, whether these people actually had a point, or if they were being glib about an ad-production process whose complexity they do not grasp. “I think it’s really that simple,” he said, adding, "If there were 50 people involved, I'd imagine there was one person that [had doubts], and—I don’t know if they were a junior person, I don’t know if they were a senior person, I don’t know what they were—but they didn’t feel comfortable speaking up in that room. Or maybe they did, and they were outvoted."

Still, there are some other, more nuanced dynamics that the advertising experts I talked to brought up when I asked them for theories about how an out-of-touch ad comes to exist.

“How do these ads get approved?,” Jill Avery, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, wrote me in an email. “By brand managers who are not doing their cultural homework—relying upon surface-level understandings of the cultural phenomenon they are featuring in their marketing communications and not understanding the deep well of emotions, identity politics, and ideologies that their ads will trigger.” She also said that campaigns can be imperiled when a company chooses to link its product to a social message that may not be part of its corporate mission.

Schuyler Vanden Bergh brought up a smaller point specific to the Pepsi ad. He noted that the ad was produced not by an outside agency but rather Pepsi’s in-house Creators League studio. “What happens sometimes with an in-house agency, and I think maybe that happened here,” he says, “is … they’re too inside, too close to the product.” Vanden Bergh was quick to acknowledge that he himself works for an agency and might be biased about the advantages of working with one. And even though outside ad agencies have surely produced their share of offensive ads, his point still stands. As more companies experiment with faster-moving, more cost-effective in-house agencies, it’s more likely that an ad won’t be exposed to enough people outside a single company’s culture.

But working with outside agencies can present its own problems. For one thing, agencies must compete against one another to earn clients’ business, which can generate high-quality work but also some less-than-ideal outcomes. Drolet Rossi, the UCLA professor, says that for big-deal spots like Super Bowl ads, the tight competition among agencies can lead them to be too ambitious in their proposals, which can backfire when those ads are actually produced.

Drolet Rossi left me with a parting thought about how much an ad like Pepsi’s actually hurts the company. She suggested that some of the company’s suffering was overblown, saying, “There's a lot of outrage, but who's being outraged? Is it in fact the people that are interested in buying Pepsi products? Pepsi targets teens—they’re young teens, because soda preferences tend to be fixed by the time you get a little older, so if they lock you in early, they kind of capture you. Then you have to ask yourself, from the perspective of a 13-year-old or a 12-year-old, which is their target: How tone-deaf and out-of-touch does it seem?"