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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
Kent – You should probably watch a lot less TV then. Especially talk shows and advertisements. (I’m with you, btw.)
(edited for clarity)
It isn’t just that they don’t know these facts, they don’t want to know them. How unseemly of you to expose her to facts that don’t fit the approved narrative.
I was struggling to make a joke about how I didn’t notice that he slipped the word “liberal” into the word “subliminal.” Yeah, I know. I should go on the road with my act, it’s so hysterical.
The game was great, the commercials not so much. That’s why I recorded the game, started watching almost an hour late, skipped through commercials and all the half time nonsense and watched only the last few minutes live. It saves not only time but also a lot of angst.
I’ve never understood why I’m expected to buy a product when the commercial doesn’t even mention the product or else it insults my character, intelligence etc. But I’ve come to understand why the ‘woke’ crowd does; it reinforces their sense of superiority. It’s virtue signaling. They get to feel ‘better’ than us because they buy something when the ad agency told them the rednecks don’t get the message subtly sent by wearing, eating, using this particular thing. No, we get it. We just aren’t that easily herded into buying your product for spurious non-reasons. So then, the ads aren’t really targeted at me. Or else that’s money wasted. Either way, I just don’t watch them. If I can’t avoid them completely I can always mute the sound.
Occasionally there is a cute one, then I’ll watch it 2 or 3 times. After that it becomes grating no matter how cute it is.
I support this theory. While attempt to stop buying coke products due to the american hijab, but it’s so damn hard to stop. I’m very glad I stopped watching the Super Bowl.
A few days ago I made the observation to my wife that while every HGTV ad has an interracial couple of the least common variety ( only 10% of marriages are “inter racial” and of those 50% are hispanic/white, which really could be white + white/spanish speaker). However, the shows themselves are super white, and rarely feature an interracial couple, and I’m sure it’s not for a lack of trying.
One more note. Every parent, white, indian, asian, whatever is only as tolerant so far as their children don’t go to schools with the same kids as the kids in the nursery. Bring back the bussing and you’ll see the true attitudes of our tolerant neighbors.
Personally, if bussing was a thing, my kids would be in private school. A subpar education and threat of violence is not a good trade for virtue signaling.
That’s why you’re not the target, you think about things.
Michael Knowles has a much different view:
http://ricochet.com/podcast/andrew-klavan-show/real-scandal-within-scandal/
How long ago was this?
But I’d bet you buy based on product performance, in other words you analyze results and purchase accordingly. Therefore you are not the target of any advertising. No ad whether print, TV, radio or internet is designed to get you to think through the purchase. And they never have been.
That said, I agree the virtue signaling is irritating but since I tuned out to the ‘messages’ decades ago, I don’t get particularly exercised over it.
There are some commercials now where there isn’t a single white person in it. There’s one that’s in someone’s kitchen, and the mom is kind of brown, you can’t tell what she is (which they love because people can fill in their own), the kids having a snack all look hispanic except for the one black kid, and they probably threw in an Asian for good measure, I forget. Watching it, you’d have no idea what country you were in. I can’t watch TV without getting clubbed over the head with it.
Welcome Instapundit readers!
Thanks @eddriscoll .
@okiesailor
This is perceptive since otherwise the alienation of others who just don’t like the preaching (regardless of having personal virtue) just can’t be well explained. And advertisers want to attract the millineal crowd for long term brand loyalty.
Could the casting decisions also be a by-product of political product boycotting (ie. Chick Fil-A), and therefore undertaken for corporate self-protection? i.e.: “Don’t look at US….we did the mixed marriage Cheerios ad.” That one sticks in my memory as one of the early mixed-marriage in a halo examples. In the web comments universe, it grew to be less about cereal than a racism test that you failed if you didn’t agree it was lovely.
So the followup chatter about such things is a further expansion of the brand exposure that plain old fashioned citing of product features doesn’t generate.
My wife and have noticed the amazing number of bi racial couples in TV commercials. Lately almost always white men with black women. According to Pew about 6% of marriages are inter racial. And black men are twice as likely to intermarry then black women.
Great post and thread.
Superbowl ad virtue displays are really the showcase of the ideology prevailing whatever the cost.
It’s not hard to pencil out the lefty antics of Kimmel and Colbert. When 2 million viewers — .6 of 1% of the American people — comprise a profitable audience, the leftiest look at me antics make sense.
And, sure, this works for Fox and Friends too.
But it’s the Superbowl. The largest audience. Croesus sums for 30 seconds.
And they can’t help themselves.
Kozak, it’s amazing how important virtue-signaling is to the corporations and ad agencies.
Kent
They would never dare show a black man with a white woman. Black women really hate that.
On a positive note, these new virtue-signaling ads are crowding out the “dumb Dad/brilliant Mom” ads that dominated the airwaves for the past few years.
That’s because they’ve become institutionalized as longer “ads” in the form of sitcoms.
When my niece and nephew were kids, my brother-in-law didn’t allow them to watch The Simpsons because the dad was an idiot and his wife even his little girl were smarter than he was. I never understood feminism’s idea that taking men down somehow makes women bigger.
When I was in college, at the dawn of the Black Power movement, the black athletes often dated white girls, and you should have heard the black girls in my freshman dorm on that topic.
I always hated to see my favorite sitcoms trying to be “topical.” It’s jarring when you’re watching it and suddenly they inject domestic violence into the story. I mean I wanted to laugh, not be made to feel angry or sad. Get over yourselves, writers.
I can’t recall where, but I’ve heard black women complain about this before. There is (and this is not my white self saying this) a shortage of black men with jobs (outside the prison system), so they have an obligation to make themselves available to “sisters.”
Kent, you might want to press the return key a couple of times, before replying to a post that you quoted. That way, it won’t include your comment as part of the quote.
The feeling seems to be that it makes it look like everybody of both races only want white women or something. So showing white men with black women doesn’t bother white women as much as the converse would bother black women. All I know is you’ll never see that in a commercial.
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Mr. SockMonkey, I don’t quite understand your advice, but I believe in you. So I will hit the return key twice from now on. I find those grey vertical lines along the side a bit confusing. That’s why I hit the return, hit the underline key a few times, hit the return key again, address the person who wrote the response, and then type my name at the end.
Kent
Success!
Yes.
It’s in a show—Frankie and Gracie, to be precise. And, of course, real life. Not that this is relevant.
I’d imagine it’s temporary. And, again, I actually approve of it because it subverts identity politics. The adorable little brown (?) kid eating Cheerios is not different in any meaningful way from an adorable little white kid eating Cheerios. The kitchens in either case are shiny-clean, the Moms cheerful, the cars new and clean and everyone is in an age-appropriate safety restraint as they toodle off to a green and pleasant suburban soccer field beside a clean, well-lighted school.
I remember expressing irritation about how movies (and books) always seemed to have a white male kid as a hero. “Why couldn’t E.T. have been found by a little black girl?” I asked rhetorically. To which whatever friend I was speaking to said “Oh, you mean why didn’t his space ship land in the ghetto?”
The multi-racial ads may not reflect accurate American demographics, but they do show (contra #BLM et al) that multi-racial is not the same as multi-cultural. Everyone in the ads is recognizably participating in mainstream, middle-class American culture.
Instalaunch! congratulations, @kentforrester! great post.