If we were advising major brands on new promo campaigns, we would generally discourage them from jumping on six-month-old web memes to hype their newest product rollouts. But what if that meme were “McKayla Maroney is not impressed” and the brand were the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group?

Yeah, we’d probably still tell them to stay away. We figured that, once the President himself gets in on a joke, the public will never see it as clever, hip or edgy again. But the soda giant has decided to revive the summer’s biggest social micro-media trend in order to get the public excited about a truly impressive new product…a ten-calorie soda! (You can hold your applause for now.)

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Today in You Guys Are Really Bumming Us Out News: At first we didn’t think Dr. Pepper was looking for a fight when planning their “Evolution of Flavor” Facebook promo spot, but then we remembered that this is America and they should have known better.

The mildly amusing ad, which casts the peculiar soda as the “missing link” in the evolutionary chain between beast and man, has accumulated 25,000 likes and 3,500 comments in less than 24 hours. What are people saying about it? Oh, the usual: Evolution is a myth and I’m offended, God is fake and you’re all idiots, spelling is overrated—the list goes on. Quite a few individuals have even announced their plans to “boycott” Dr. Pepper products without realizing that, by bringing attention to the brand, they’re playing right into the hands of the sugar-water heathens…

And, of course, the whole mini-controversy also inspired an extended thread on Reddit. This is the world in which we live.

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Dr. Pepper is taking a cue from Our Gang’s “He-Man Women Haters Club” with its new soft drink Dr. Pepper Ten. The brand is tapping the male taste for diet cola with marketing that states explicitly that this soda is “not for women.”

The AP points out that other diet sodas have taken the male-centric angle, like Coke Zero. And Dr. Pepper has done some research and found that women weren’t offended by this marketing angle (but thanks for asking).  You’ll recall, earlier this year the VW Beetle was beefed up a bit so it wouldn’t be too “girlie” and turn off all of those manly men out there who would otherwise buy a Hyundai or something.

FlavorWire takes issue with the can, which it outright calls “ugly” but we say looks like a football helmet for some reason. The brand’s Facebook page also puts the male message front and center.

Food marketers out there correct us if we’re wrong, but we hadn’t noticed any need to appeal to men with diet soft drinks. A guy in the AP story says he’s never been teased for drinking Diet Coke, but the AP story says specifically that men aren’t happy with the diet cola image. We’ll be curious to see if this changes that. We have the ad after the jump.

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