From One Extreme to the Other, Advertisers Continue to Use Situation Comedy to Make a Point
One interesting commercial shows what should be a smart young executive in competition with her male co-worker for a promotion, who catches him sleeping on the job. She writes “stupid” on his head then walks out and goes to a meeting with the boss. He was supposed to be at that meeting. He wakes up and then walks into the meeting late, in which the boss looks at him strangely. Ok, so she is obviously going to get the promotion because someone wrote the equivalent of “Kick Me” on his forehead, which wouldn’t have happened had he been doing his job. Who wrote that on his head, and why isn’t the boss angry at her for stooping so low as it is obvious that she is the one who did it, given that she appeared on time and he didn’t. We are supposed to appreciate her wit, but then again, why is she digressing to adolescent pranks to get her point across. Supposedly eating the salad makes her smarter, or obviously, she is smart because she ate the salad. Ok somehow African-American women in the workplace climbing the corporate ladder are not as smart as we had originally thought that they would be. Plus, if she was really smart she’d realize that what you save in fat you make up with in carbohydrates if you put toppings on the salad.
In another commercial a young woman walks down the street in some ghetto somewhere and overhears voices from behind a picket fence. She looks in to see computer animated women sitting around and enjoying a “fruit buzz”, which is Mcdonalds’ new way of describing how eating their fruit and walnut salads will make you feel. She talks to the animated characters from the real world for a while until they convince her to come in and enjoy the meal with them. I guess she was “frontin” or something, but she gives in and walks over to the other side, becoming a computer animated character herself and enjoys the fruit salad. I’m not sure which is worse, the idea that nutriution is such a foreign concept to African-Americans that the metaphor of the divide between the digital world and the real world must be used to illustrate the point or the fact that it is difficult to tell if she is talking to herself, as she is a little crazy. I haven’t seen African-Americans in this poor of a form since viewing the “Women of Brewster Place”. You know for us it’s always a matter of simply taking into consideration what opportunities were always in front of us in the first place. Then again, Burger King has a young man waking up entirely too early on a Saturday morning to enjoy an enormous sandwhich served by the King himself, so go figure.
Exactly what are we loving about Mcdonalds, or any other fast food “joint”? Perhaps it is the fact that the company has solidified their committment to the African-American community through their 365 Black campaign, in which they go as far as using the Baobab tree to illustrate their point. Using the tree of life, is there no longer anything that is sacred, that isn’t used by some corporation somewhere to “connect” deeply with their consumers? We have smart, expertly written commercials that illustrate just how dumb we are when it comes to consuming high calorie foods that are full of cholesterol. I can remember the drama that surrounded food restaurants’ decision to use monosodium glutamate in their food and chlorofluorocarbons in their Styrofoam containers. They stopped using both and we simply assumed that everything else would change as well. Nevertheless, exactly what do they think of their consumers? If you do love fast food, or want to have it your way, or decide that you want to take a break from healthy entrees, we understand. But when the ads digress the actors that play in these commercials, to a role similar to one of a beer drinker who thinks that it’s better for him, because it’s light in calories and low in carbohydrates, I’ll think twice before purchasing the product.
