A joke and two ads walk into a bar.
One of the ads fizzles out, the other stinks and the joke — well, it just falls flat.
If you consumed any media this week, you would have heard that the Pepsi ad, the Nivea deodorant ad and Canadian comic Russell Peters’ Juno non-joke all met with Internet justice — that harsh form of outrage with the power to (temporarily) humble mighty corporations.
The Junos’ president apologized for Peters’ tasteless launch of the awards on Sunday when he said, “Look at all the young girls. This is a felony waiting to happen.”
Pepsi hastily withdrew its ad Wednesday after facing fierce scorn for trivializing resistance movements by borrowing imagery from protests to peddle pop and featuring, of all people, a Jenner or a Kardashian or some such, who offers an adversarial cop a Pepsi. Problem solved. Black Lives Matter folks, you can go home now. NYPD, you can call off your spies.
Then there is Nivea, which didn’t learn from its own past (the year: 2011, the photo: a clean-shaven black man holding a mannequin head with an afro and a beard, the tagline: Re-Civilize Yourself). It pulled a deodorant ad it used this week in the Middle East that featured the back of a woman with long dark hair wearing white in a white room and the words “White is Purity.”
Say what?
There appears to be a bad case of finger-in-ear-itis going around. As previously silenced people find their voice on digital platforms, a whole slew of others who are uncomfortable about adjusting their perspectives are stuffing their fingers in their ears and going la-la-la-la.
I used to believe insensitivity came from ignorance. I’m not so sure now. Given the openness of social media, it seems impossible that corporations don’t know the difference between clever and insulting. It’s more like they don’t care.
Do their people speak to anyone outside their own circles? Do they read? Listen to the news? Process information from somebody else’s perspective?
Or do they just think any publicity is good publicity?
Of the three incidents, Peters at least has an excuse — put-down humour is his schtick. Where would Peters be if he couldn’t poke fun at cultures and accents and stereotypes? Yet, making a rape joke at this raw time for women’s rights is no hit and all miss. It comes when the U.S. has a president who thinks “you can do anything” to women. If comedy is about timing, Peters failed; he was on the wrong platform making the wrong joke at the wrong time.
The ads — and these are by no means rare, just the latest in a string of many — are inexplicable. A team of people draw up a ‘concept,’ based on marketing goals and focus group feedback. The ideas go up the corporate chain for approvals. Changes, more feedback, improvements, and then, voila, the final product … and this is what they come up with?
Were the Nivea people really naïve enough to think if red is power and green is eco-friendliness then it was okay to say white is purity.
What horrified its bosses more when they decided to pull the ad? The backlash to the ad or the support the German company’s tagline got from white supremacists?
Products that have nothing inherently wholesome to offer, lean on manufactured sentimentality to promote themselves. How many ways to Sunday can you promote a combination of sugar, chemicals and water? That’s why Coke needed to focus on world peace (as dreamt up by Don Draper in the Mad Men season finale) and Pepsi thinks it needs to promote racial harmony.
Did the PepsiCo. folks — apparently this was an in-house job — see black people risking their lives to protest police brutality or women marching for rights under threat and think, “Gee, what a good way to sell soda pop.” Did they see the dignity of Ieshia Evans facing down four police officers in riot gear in Baton Rouge, Louisiana last year, and think, yes, the best way to honour that moment would be to have a reality star offer Pepsi to a cop?
That’s not all. PepsiCo. issued a casting call for a video being filmed this weekend, seeking youths of different ethnicities, “someone from the inner city.” Inner-city, the word Donald Trump uses frequently as code for minorities — poor and violent blacks, more specifically. Could someone please tell these people that the portion of rich white people living in “inner cities” has increased drastically while blacks continue to move out?
Having diverse staff with voices that carry weight is an obvious antidote to this nonsense. For some reason, companies find that difficult to manage. Just not enough talent among people of colour, right?
Just enough money to buy your products, though, so they still count.
So what should ad men and jokesters do? Here’s a suggestion: pretend you are playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. You are at the point in the game when you still have a lifeline before you hit Ask The Audience. Remember all those women and people of colour who are your friends? The ones you tout anytime someone calls you sexist or racist? Now is the time to Phone That Friend.
Shree Paradkar tackles issues of race and gender. You can follow her @shreeparadkar
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