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Subliberal Advertising
While watching TV advertising, I often get the feeling I’m being lectured to.
The Super Bowl yesterday was a series of lectures with this message: “As often as we’ve tried to educate you people out there in flyover country, you remain resistant to our efforts to civilize you. We continue to detect traces of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia in your makeup; so it’s our moral imperative to disabuse you of those ideas.”
If a young girl and a boy are in some kind of competition—running, shooting a basket, doing a science project—put your money on the girl. She’s a shoe-in. It’s all terribly cute, of course. Look, the girl beat the boy! But the schtick is getting a bit tired. Ad folk, lay off the ideology for a bit, for goodness sakes, and let the poor boy win every now and then.
There seems to be some kind of law in advertising that if you show two kids, one of them has to be black. The rule is so strict that there must be some kind of jail (probably on Madison Avenue) for those who break this law. In a group of seven or so, three or four will be “people of color.” They’ll sometimes show an Asian in a group shot, but Asians just don’t count as much as blacks. We’re being lectured to, folks.
In the Super Bowl T-Mobile ad showing a bunch of babies, more than half of which were “babies of color,” we were told that “Some people will be threatened” by the varied hues of these babies. “But,” we’re told, “you will love who you want.” Why do I get the feeling that person who considered himself enlightened was scolding me for my benighted ways?
The Kraft ad in the Super Bowl featured gay couples and interracial couples. “There is no right way to family” (using “family” as a verb) we were told by an ad that obviously was tweaking the noses of the unenlightened.
Perhaps it all started with that Coca Cola ad almost fifty years ago that wanted to teach the world to sing, with a long shot of a multi-cultural group of young people, all mingling peacefully, loving one another, all grokking one another. No borders for these folk.
These lectures are so important to the woke folk on Madison Avenue that the corporations—and the ad agencies that do their bidding—spend untold millions of dollars in which the products themselves never make an appearance. There was nary a phone in the T-Mobile ad, and no macaroni showed up in the Kraft ad.
I was trying to enjoy the Super Bowl, but these darned ads were harshing my mellow. (I can’t get enough of that phrase, which I stole from a DocJay post.)
Published in Culture
This is what annoys me too. Lately it seems every commercial features multi-racial families for every product, from the blonde mom at the airport (they cast a blonde to make her as white as possible) with the four black children to the detergent commercial with the middle-aged multi-racial couple with the multi-racial daughter. The thing that annoys me is that actually, I have no problem with multi-racial families but I can’t tell that to the little 30-year-old MBAs at the ad agency who are sure that I do, and that it’s their job to shove it in my face until I’m as civilized as they are. It’s heavy-handed, sanctimonious, and self-righteous, and I’m sick to death of it.
It’s very strange indeed, since it shows really poor business sense to alienate half your customers. And more and more companies who should know better are doing it.
And the Vikings!
There seemed to be a concerted effort to give me the idea that Tide is a laundry detergent. And furthermore, that it is desirable that my white shirts are as white as possible.
Hilarious.
Proposition:
TV commercials are primarily intended to get people to feel positively about the product / brand / etc. — not think positively, feel positively — hopefully resulting in increased sales.
The cohort of people who are most receptive to this sort of emotional manipulation are also the most likely to be susceptible to virtue signaling manipulation.
Ergo, these companies know exactly what they’re doing. Those of us who are irritated by these commercials are less likely to be emotionally manipulated by a TV commercial to begin with. We’re not the target.
I’m just trying to figure out how the T-Mobile ad was not considered too political and allowed to run but an ad asking people to stand for the national anthem is too controversial and political. I guess I just don’t get it.
Lately I seem to be nobody’s ad target. Sometimes the world feels like one big party that I wasn’t invited to.
So, I was supposed to feel that Tide isn’t some kind of party drug? I never thought that.
Two surprises: the Wrangler didn’t recross the river with a family of illegals and the Manning/Beckham commercial wasn’t scolded for a certain mocking homoeroticism.
Imagine if, instead of the social justice preaching, one of the corporate sponsors had made a public statement about investing in America and American jobs following the tax and regulatory reforms recently enacted. Imagine the howls of protest against politicizing sports!
But the season ended with everyone standing for the anthem and the MVP won by a Liberty U. theology student.
My husband mentioned the Tide ads too.
He thinks they are dealing with the PR problem they are having at the moment with people eating the Tide pods. :)
Lately? Lucky you. I’ve had that feeling since the ’90s, at least.
I had to reply to this to say, “Hear! Hear!” on both counts.
A “like” wasn’t enough.
I just can’t watch one more of these fantasies. I do watch forensic files. When the girl fights back they find out by the DNA under her fingernails during the autopsy.
I hate corporate virtue-signaling.
___
Hey Ralphie (“Christmas Story”?), Forensic Files is my favorite show. My wife has taped 26 shows for me. It’s just about the only thing I watch on TV these days, except for an occasional episode of Pawn Stars and Handcrafted America.
Peter Dinklage would not approve.
Boston is around 25% black. To the extent it’s segregated today, I’d say, like a lot of expensive cities, economic factors are the dominant reason.
So do I, and while I do get the comment above about target audiences, I also think it’s really dumb business practice. I mean I buy detergent too.
Agreed. My theory (echoed above) is that the marketers have decided that most of us who it annoys don’t care enough to not buy the product, while a significant number of people do care if your ad is, say, multiracial and won’t buy the product if it isn’t. I think that came out right.
I didn’t notice anything interesting about the title…
But, yeah, of course we’re being lectured to. I’ve known that since every TV show I saw as a kid had to have an episode about how racism is bad. Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but it’s always annoyed me that these low-brow sitcoms had the nerve to take on something like that. This is an issue people have died over – and you’re going to capitalize on it with your cheap virtue-signalling? Aren’t you special?
These commercials are the same way. Apparently, the dreaded Millennial generation wants to know their favorite corporations are “woke.” Saying pretty things about equality is enough to establish “wokeness,” it would seem.
That’s because he changed it. It originally read “This One Goes Out to Henry.”
I didn’t watch the game, but I have seen that commercial. My reaction was, ‘If I were a T Mobile customer, I would switch to AT&T ASAP just because of that sermonizing ad.’
I agree. The worst racists I have ever known were in Boston and Chicago for white racists, Washington, D.C. for black racists, and California for Hispanic racists.
I grew up in Virginia and certainly saw some racism, but it was mild and less vicious than Boston without a doubt. That is, I knew people who would casually talk about “niggers” but I never saw them hate blacks or treat them with malice. It was more of a “separate but equal” mentality. But the people I know from Boston were vicious about their hatred of blacks.
So, I think you’re on to something.
I feel exactly the same way. Y’know, there’s nothing wrong with it if you want to marry someone of your own race.
And kids? There’s now no such thing in TV commercial-land as a cute white kid.
Gay couples? Very cool! And as a bonus: they can’t reproduce.
It’s pop-cultural genocide.
After one Tide ad , I actually commented ‘Look at that, a completely white family, I thought that had been made illegal’
That commercial could have been filmed in the back seat of any police car I ever drove.
Wow, I did screw up—it’s white people who are (almost) 60%, right? I’m sorry!
But yes, absolutely to the explanation for the segregation: that’s one of the many points I wish people would grasp. “Racism” ought not to be the default explanation for any phenomenon that appears to affect white and black and brown people differently because it obscures far more than it reveals (including when it comes to solutions).
For instance, the whole time #BLM was protesting “racism” and demanding an end to “racism” in Baltimore, there were seriously corrupt police officers committing crimes, but they were corrupt in ways that had nothing to do with race.