Tag Archives: advertising

Corporations, Morality, Psychology, Society

Does YOUR Favorite Corporation Exploit Tragedy for Sales?

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MCDONALDS 911 AD

It’s not like capitalists deserve your pity when they accidentally offend people while they try to embrace their communities to build spirit. And profit.

It is partly because corporations are pretend human beings, with no emotions, no social conscience [beyond PR gains] and no capacity for human empathy, which is a fundamental part of human society.

Corporations must maximize shareholder wealth, while exploiting people and the environment. So no surprise that when they try to improve market share by corporatizing 9/11 and Boston Strong some people get offended.

And why not! Try this one on: “Remember 9/11; Soooo, Make Sure You Shop at Dick’s Vinyl Siding.”

It doesn’t ring true. That’s because we resent corporations who try to be human. But we need to do a better job of that!

Now, look at all the filth McDonald’s endures while trying to become your bestie:

McDonald’s Ad Referencing 9/11, Boston Bombing Provokes Strong Reactions.

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog referred to it as “tone deaf” and a “disarming minute of mushy corporate propaganda.” Some noted the irony of an ad celebrating the company’s role in the community, given ongoing protests by workers and labour organizers calling for higher pay and a union. For others, the reference to the Sept. 11 attacks and Boston Marathon bombing in a McDonald’s ad were jarring, and some commenters on Facebook and Twitter called it crass and exploitive.

Other companies have faced sharp backlash for incorporating national tragedies into their marketing. In 2013, AT&T was criticized for a tweet that commemorated the Sept. 11 attacks while showing off its smartphone. Campbell Soup also apologized that year for a tweet by SpaghettiOs asking followers to “Take a moment and remember #PearlHarbor with us.” The tweet featured an image of its smiling cartoon mascot jauntily holding an American flag.

The ad by McDonald’s isn’t entirely surprising. During an investor meeting last month, McDonald’s USA President Mike Andres noted the company is working with franchisees to strengthen their ties in communities. The majority of the company’s more than 14,000 U.S. restaurants are operated by franchisees.

“More than ever, people want to feel good about the businesses and the brands they do businesses with,” he said.

McDonald’s Ad Referencing 9/11, Boston Bombing Provokes Strong Reactions.

Corporations, Equality, Feminism, Media

How @Dicks Sporting Goods Can Advance Feminism, So Easily

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Dick’s Sporting Goods, in the all-too testosterone world of sports, released a catalogue with virtually no women in it. Except for cheerleaders and a girl watching men play sports.

A 12-year-old calls them out on this because even 12-year-olds get equality.

Dick’s sent a FOAD brush off letter back [see below].

Here’s what Dick’s ought to do now.

  1. Recognize that there is profound sexism in sports.
  2. Recognize that they have been a part of that.
  3. Seek out organizations that promote equality in sports.
  4. Partner with them to promote equality.
  5. Open up their catalogue and advertising process to expanded stakeholder input.
  6. Help be part of the solution to sexism in athletics.
  7. Revel in the earned media, because they’re already suffering in it, so they may as well learn from their sexism, solve their own internal problems and make the world a better place.

There. That wasn’t so hard!

A 12-year-old girl is winning support online after she questioned a sporting goods catalogue over its infrequent use of women in a recent publication.

McKenna Peterson lives in Phoenix but grew up in Regina. Her family moved to Arizona two years ago where McKenna is an avid basketball player.

She wrote to Dick’s Sporting Goods this week about their Basketball 2014 catalogue, questioning why so few women appeared on its pages.

“There are NO girls in the catalog,” she wrote, although she immediately corrected herself by noting there was one image of a woman — as an observer sitting in the stands at a men’s game.

“And there are some cheerleaders on some coupons,” she added.

Peterson’s letter went on to talk about the value in the equal portrayal of men and women in sport.

“It’s hard enough for girls to break through in this sport [basketball] as it is, without you guys excluding us from your catalog,” she wrote. “Girls buy stuff from your store.”

Where are the girls? Youngster asks of Dick’s Sporting Goods catalogue – Saskatchewan – CBC News.

A Better World is Needed, Class War, Consumerism, Corporations, Feminism, Identity, Psychology, Society, Transit, Vancouver, Voluntary Simplicity

Shame on You, You Ugly, Narcissistic Consumer

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"If you had a secret wish, would you make it beautiful?" - False Creek Plastic Surgery Centre

Some days it’s hard to make it through the day without something like the [theoretically] “public” transit system trying to shame us as ugly narcissistic consumers with their adcreep, just in time for Christmas!

Because we are not beautiful, we need plastic surgery. But we should not brag about it or openly discuss it with our peers: it needs to be a secret wish. Ads like this one from the for-profit False Creek Plastic Surgery Centre abuse us into thinking we’re ugly, then shame us into secretly wishing to be beautiful.

Priceless. We’re beautiful already, but the ad’s job is to convince us of the lie that we’re ugly.

"Our World Revolves Around You" - The Perfect New World of Technology: The HP Store in Vancouver

And then we have the new HP Store in Vancouver. Its goal is to let us know that the world revolves around me. I truly am that special. Except I’m a mark. HP is modelling its narcissism-inducing relationship with its customers after the Apple Store’s worship/exploitation of its cult members.

And perhaps the worst thing about this particular ad is that it appears to be on a bus shelter on Burrard near the SkyTrain station, but in fact it’s the same physical structure of a bus shelter ad, but it’s just sitting there on the street for people to walk into. It’s a TransLink billboard plunked right there on the sidewalk in our way when we’re walking, a billboard outside the transit system.

Adcreep takes a new angle.

So what is our job this Christmas?

  1. voluntary simplicity
  2. reject affluenza
  3. recognize we already have enough stuff
  4. remember that we’re all beautiful
  5. get over yourself if you think the HP world actually revolves around you, or that anything does
  6. know we are loved, honoured and cherished as human beings regardless of how much plastic surgery we’ve had or how big our hard drive is.

It’s hard to have a merry Christmas if you let the adcreep brainwash you into perceiving yourself as ugly, shameful and narcissistic…all at once. It takes decades of psychological work and training to get us to be all those things simultaneously.

Break out of that and suddenly you’ll notice the homeless teen 75 feet from the HP ad who also deserves the dignity that the adcreep is trying to rob from us all.

Now go give a hug to someone you love.

British Columbia, Class War, Corporations, Democracy, Environment, Executive Overdrive, Morality, Neoliberal Economics, Privatization, Society, Soft Fascism, Transit, Vancouver

Just How Galling is TransLink’s Taxation Without Representation?

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I wince in pain every time I board a Skytrain car and see this sign reminding us to keep our transit system clean. The TransLink board is a 21st century example of 18th century taxation without representation as the draconian BC Liberal government altered TransLink’s existence to ensure an appointed board is not accountable to the civic officials who fund it with billions of dollars.

“It’s your transit system too, help keep it clean.” I like the sentiment, but it hurts to think that while we all pay for the transit system, we do not have authority over it.

Every time I see this sign, I am reminded of what the BC Liberal party has taken away from all of us.

So I’d like to begin a campaign to encourage TransLink to name its new electronic fare card “TWR: taxation without representation”. If you would like to leap on this bandwagon, please cruise by their website and enter that idea for the card. Vote early and vote often. You can enter the contest as many times as you like until November 8, 2010. And you can win an iPad or an electronic fare card with a year’s worth of transit on it. In fact, I’m going to go put in another entry right now. OK, I put in 3 entries.

And for you enterprising students out there looking for a class project, I submit this for your consideration. Let’s see if we can plump the votes up so that all other suggestions get voted off the island. But of course, there is no democracy in TransLink so even if some enterprising person built a little app/script to enter TWR until it gets billions of votes, I’m sure we’ll still get something embarrassing, or at the very least anti-democratic.

And while I’m remarking on how surreal it is to live in a world like before the American Revolution, I’d like to ask you if you have noticed how those expensive TVs on Skytrain platforms are full of adcreep, but they are missing the most essential piece of information in a transit system: the time.

Corporations, Economics, Education, Feminism, Gender Issues, Health, Postmodernism

Real Soap, “Real” Beauty, “Real” Feminism?

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Dove soap’s Campaign for Real Beauty is very interesting to me. I’ve seen the billboards and I appreciate their attempt to legitimize beauty beyond what we’re brainwashed with in Maxim, Playboy, Baywatch and the like.

But I’m not so sure about Dove. I’m not so sure that even if their soap products, etc. are stupendous that I respect them co-opting a legitimate debate for corporate ends. True, they may be spurring some to expand their sense of beauty, but underlying Maxim, Playboy, Baywatch and Dove is the consumerist necessity of defining for us what we want so we can buy it from one company, as opposed to the other.

So cynically–or perhaps realistically–Dove is merely engaging us in clever market segmentation: they are the soap for people who don’t wish to recognize any legitimacy in stereotyped constructions of beauty. How post-modern of them.

Then there’s the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, that helps “girls all over the world to overcome everyday beauty pressures.” Right. Again, Dove may be god’s gift to women’s dermatological health, but do we really want Dove being in charge of this dialogue? They sure want to be in charge of it. Great viral PR [we’re encouraged to invite friends to the website]. In fact, instead of them actually having to advertise to you about how great they are in funding socially-conscious projects, we end up seeking that information from them. It’ll stick to us better that way because we want to know about them. The cosmetics and health products industries are prime culprits in destroying women’s self-esteem. How ironic–or socially healing?–of Dove to try to rectify this. Either way, they will probably sell more soap.

Happily for Dove, 2 of the 5 items listed as success stories for the Self-Esteem Fund are photo exhibitions they created themselves.

It may be terrible to rub this in, but Dove is even doing market research on us as we navigate their site. In providing information about their motives [thoroughly altruistic sounding, of course–remember, they’re on our side!], they ration the information so that we need to click to further screens for elaboration. They end up with a good sense of just how much each of us is interested in various depths of information. This information about us can be combined with a log of all pages we visit on their site [including the time we spend between clicking through pages] to give them a pretty wonderful sense of how much we care to know. Heck, even I track my access logs to examine reading/clicking habits on my site [anonymously, though, because I collect nothing about yall but IP numbers]; I’ve got to believe Dove does it too. Worse still, if we actually log in and supply demographic data when we create our profile on the site [assuming a certain percentage of those signing up are not lying], they get an even broader sense of us, despite their claim that they only collect navigation data anonymously and in the aggregate. And what is our benefit from all this? Better soap? Better self-esteem through Dove products?

Even more cynically, perhaps, how many of the people taking part in the definition of beauty discussions on that site are Dove lackeys spinning conversation in defined PR areas? If I were running this campaign, I wouldn’t leave the discussion board completely at the mercy of regular normal people without having my branding agents subtly making it all worthwhile.

So then I dug through my hard drive to find the August 1992 update of the soc.feminism faq that defines various flavours of feminism to see which ones would support Dove’s campaign and which ones would condemn it. The updated faq of Different Flavours of Feminism is more useful.

Applying each flavour to Dove’s campaign will require great thought: more than I can accomplish without a few more days/weeks of mental meandering. [Maybe in the meantime I’ll write something in here about the disaster of w.Caesar’s election. Or not]

For now, until you follow the link to the full faq with descriptions of the flavours, here they are, listed:

Amazon Feminism

Anarcho-Feminism

Cultural Feminism

Erotic Feminism

Eco-Feminism

Feminazi

Feminism and Women of Color

Individualist, or Libertarian Feminism

Lesbianism

Liberal Feminism

Marxist and Socialist Feminism

Material Feminism

Moderate Feminism

‘pop-feminism’

Radical Feminism

Separatists

Men’s Movements:

Feminist Men’s Movement

Men’s Liberation Movement

Mythopoetic Men’s Movement

The New Traditionalists

The Father’s Movements

Finis