Today I saw this ad on TV. It’s for Jack in the Box smoothies:
It seems pretty offensive to me, particularly given that it describes menopausal women as ’street rat crazy’. When I compare it to the Motrin ad that caused all the furor back in November (I wrote about it here) it seems much worse. Sure, criticisms of the Motrin piece focused on insidious details, but the sexism of this Jack in the Box seems both overt and, well, nasty.
I found a few blogposts criticizing this ad, and some complaints (as well as some support) on Twitter. There’s nothing, though, that matches the uproar that the Motrin ad earned.
So what gives? Why isn’t this ad causing the same fuss? I have a variety of theories, but I don’t want to bias anybody’s responses.
We use Gmail for our personal and professional email. As Gmail users know, Google often runs a content-specific text ad in the space above the main buttons in the interface. Tonight, while looking at my Inbox view (as opposed to viewing or writing a message) I noticed the ad:
It is, indeed, an ad for KLM. The ad’s link is here. If you click that, you’ll notice that it actually redirects three times (once from Googlesyndication.com, and then three times around the KLM site). That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?
Is there some secret code that I’m supposed to crack, or is that just gibberish? The irony, of course, is that the nonsense words actually made me click the link.
Today I read on Mathew’s site about how mommy bloggers are up in arms over a (beautifully designed, incidentally) Motrin commercial. Here it is:
The righteous indignation is pretty thick. Amy Gates characterized it as an attack on ‘babywearing’ (a term I hadn’t heard before). Jennifer says the ad “is offensive and extremely disrespectful to moms”. And, as you’d expect, there’s plenty of chatter on Twitter.
After watching the ad twice, I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Is the problem that Motrin suggests that carrying a child in some kind of wearable attachment might result in pain? That seems like a legitimate possibility. If a backpack or shoulder bag hurts your back, then why wouldn’t carrying a kid?
Is there some massive anti-baby-wearing conspiracy that I don’t know about? Are the nation’s pram-makers secretly funding anti-sling propaganda?
I’ve also read a lot of criticism of the ad’s thesis that “wearing your baby seems to be in fashion”. That sounds accurate to me. Every celebrity magazine I see at the grocery store features famous women and their babies. Frequently the celebs are ‘wearing’ their baby. If these magazines reflect current trend, then it’s fair to say that “wearing your baby seems to be in fashion”. Let me put this question to my older readers: is baby-wearing more popular today than it was twenty or thirty years ago?
Does Your Kid Hurt Your Back? Try Our Pills
The whole thing strikes me as a heated over-reaction to a totally ordinary advertisement. The rage from the mommy blogosphere implies that no mother ever suffered any pain from wearing her baby, and that the very notion is somehow abhorrent. When I compare this with the recent breast-feeding plus H&M issue, it pales in comparison along any axis.
Importantly, the ad doesn’t advocate a particular approach to child-rearing. It just says “hey, if your back hurts from wearing your kid, try our painkiller.” What am I missing?
In any case, it could make a nice fresh case study for the book we’re writing. We have a pending chapter tentatively entitled “Damage Control”.
UPDATE: Motrin posted an apology (direct link to the image) and promised to pull the ad. I’d excerpt it here, but it was posted as an image, not text. On the other hand, the image file is called ‘marketing_message.jpg’. If they had gone with text, that message might reach more people.
Does anybody else remember that phrase? It bubbled up out of the hazy corners of my memory today, as it does every once in a while. There are only three results for the phrase “rattan to go” on the Web, but Nadya over at Retro Junk offers a good introduction to this strange local commercial from the eighties:
What was it advertising? I think it was a furniture store; in fact, I could be almost positive it was a furniture store. Yes, actually, it had to be. Now that I’m recalling the deeper meaning of the lyrical content, there’s no way that it couldn’t be an advertisement for a furniture store. As a child, it was just an astonishing, mesmerizing array of visuals, accompanied by a few scant lines of dialogue containing words that were meaningless to me, as I didn’t understand them. Allow me to illustrate: an ebony-skinned man with a large smile, wearing a white suit and white gloves and matching white top hat, slinking around a darkened environment.
I wonder when in the eighties that was? Some time in the mid-eighties, I’d guess. You probably have to be over thirty to remember it.
I recall that the actor–one Blu Mankuma, apparently–had the darkest skin I’d ever seen in my young life. There was a very kind of colonial, Caribbean groove, and there may have been a woman dancing around in the background. I’m probably confusing that with an ad for champagne from the same period (I can still hum the jingle. The woman sounded like Julie Andrews and the name of the wine sounded like ‘hawktala’).
Our Irish friends are here visiting, and one of them told me about this great commercial for Skoda (a car which, for reasons I can’t recall, I think of as kind of crap):
