They’ve been showing a Subway commercial pretty often here about some guy named Jared who “has inspired a lot of people”. They don’t say anything else, but one gathers he lost a lot of weight by walking a lot and eating low fat sandwiches. So far so good. I’ll ignore whether it is disingenuous to claim 6 grams of fat by ignoring most of the routinely used ingredients.
My question is this. Given the multicultural milieu found in North America, it is unusual to see a commercial that features lots of people without a token non-caucasian. This commercial focuses on four white guys “inspired” by Jared (presumably to lose weight) and then shows a crowd of fifteen or so white people heading to Subway.
Errr… my question? When was the last time you saw an ad like this? Under the assumption that manipulating ad-makers rarely do things by accident, don’t non-Whites eat very often at Subway? Can everyone sit on the subway in this day and age?
From what I understand, Jared is a real life guy, and he really did lose all that weight by walking a whole lot and eating Subway sandwiches (the low-fat ones with no cheese or mayo or whathaveyou). When Subway found out about him, they ran a big ad campaign for quite a while. I suppose the “inspired by Jared” stories are also true, in which case, it’s not the company being non-PC. It’s just that the people who were inspired by Jared just happened to be all white.
Well, if I remember correctly, the woman in the commercial lost about 60 pounds, and the two guys lost 90-something pounds each. These people could just be the most impressive successes among the people who wrote into Subway telling them how wonderful the “Jared diet” was. Someone who “only” lost 10-15 pounds doesn’t really make that compelling a testimonial.
And I believe that Jared himself lost 245 lbs. on the diet. This just boggles my mind. In order for me to lose that much, I’d pretty much have to create a whole antimatter version of myself or something. Anyways, I’d imagine that while they probably didn’t care too much about looking racially diverse, there was no hidden message involved.
One of the women in that commercial (the one getting off the bus) is from my home town of Springfield, Iillinois. Her name is Pamela Blakeman and, IIRC, she lost about 90 pounds on the Subway diet. She’s a bit of a celebrity around here- that is, every Suway in town has her picutre and the newspaper article about her displayed prominently.
And, oddly enough, that is not a Springfield Mass Transit District bus they show in the commercial :rolleyes:. Must be a prop of some kind. Freaking ripoff.
Jared is definitely a real life guy. He lives in my town of Bloomington, IN and is a student here at Indiana University.
Incidentally, he goes to the one Subway I try to avoid because there’s nowhere to park and there’s always a long, long, long (like sometimes around the block) line of students waiting for food.
IMO, Jared didn’t lose weight eating Subway food, he lost weight starving while waiting to buy it.
Don’t be so quick to look for racism in commercials. Groupings happen. Say that the only big success stories happened to be all whites. So? Should Subway then “lie”, and have some actors portray fake people who were “inspired by Jared”?
Always remember - there is more than enough racism, homophobia, and ethnic hatred in this world to go around, without creating it out of something so innocuous.
I don’t think Subway should use a “token” individual, and I don’t think I am creating homophobia, ethnic phobia or racial hatred by pointing out it is unusual for a commercial that features a lot of people not to make an effort to show a cross-section of society in the hope of appealing to a broader audience. I like Subway subs. But if celebrity is to be had, you can’t tell me the people featured in the commercial were the only ones to write in with their results. And even here in Spittleville, a random group of 20 people would look less like a GOP convention than that commercial. It was just an observation. There is no reason to believe ther people in the crowd scene marching to Subway were all “big success stories” too.
[nitpick]Antimatter doesn’t have negative mass. It’d be cool if it did, 'cause then we’d have antigravity! On the other hand, it might be very uncool, because maybe that would make the Universe fly apart.[/nitpick] That was a cute image, though.
And here I thought this thread was going to be about whether any non-whites were inspired by Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel, where he explores the reasons for European colonial expansion.
Subway’s ad agency isn’t made up of a bunch of yahoos sitting around making strange commercials. Believe me somebody noticed the same thing you did but decided to produce the commerical anyway. Knowing that someone would notice what you noticed they made a calculated decision that 1) few people would notice or 2) that even if someone noticed, nobody would really care. My guess is that these are real live people and they just happen to be all white. Subway didn’t want to wait until some non-whites showed up (although I’m sure they would have preferred that) so they put the ad together with the people they had. I’ve seen contrived ads, that is ads which don’t pretend to be made of real people, where everyone in the ad it black, or hispanic. Surely they don’t mean to exclude white people from buying their products… they just wanted to make a statement. In this case I doubt Subway is trying to make a statement… if they were they wouldn’t be very bright and I really don’t think that is the case.
