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Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Vox Popoli: You ARE being lectured - Sub-Liberal Advertising

America is getting increasingly tired of Corporate Globo's endless and inescapable lectures on social justice:

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.

One can't really call it "Corporate America" anymore. There is nothing American about it.