I suppose I should have prefaced all of this with the following disclaimer:
I just finished watching * Bamboozled *, and my outlook on racial profiling, especially for comedic effect is, at the moment, a little sensitive. I highly suggest everyone watch that film (when it comes out…advance screening copies are the only advantage of being a video store clerk…), read the empirical data on minorities on television both on the features and on the commericals and then totally write me off. Just don’t write me off, though.
Here’s an easy test: watch an hour of prime time TV (networks, obviously BET and other like cable channels are gonna have more minorities). Make a list. Number of white characters/commericals vs minorities. Any minorities. Then go to the census web site and check out the racial populations in this country.
I’m not saying it’s the biggest deal in the world. That’s why I put this in MPSIMS and not GD or IMHO. It really is just a stupid commerical from a stupid service. But it is an annoyance.
I just think that the woman’s movement made it OK to say “I feel this show is sexist,” but if someone says “I think this show is racist,” the reaction is far more volitile and emotional, and, IMHO, all too often dismissive. This thread is case in point. I’m not saying that you have to agree with me, just consider the concept that mass media only thinks to use minorities for comedic effect.
I thought the Kabuki “narration” was pretty appalling… But then, at least they showed a young Asian couple instead of a white guy with a Japanese girl. I don’t know, maybe I’m just extra-senstive to portrayals of Asians since I spend more time with them than my fellow whitebread.
For what it’s worth, I must have seen that Taco Bell at least ten times by now, and only when reading this thread did I realize that the guy they were making fun of was black. I mean, I must have registered it at some level when watching the commercial, but it didn’t once occur to me, “Oh, they’re making fun of the black guy.” I just thought, “Oh, they’re making fun of their friend.”
And then I winced because the commercial was so dumb in the first place.
Haven’t seen the MSN commercial that the OP mentioned, but I did find the two “devious women” commercial to be slightly irritating. Not outright offensive, just…irritating. Of course, I find most MSN commercials to be irritating, so I’m not sure that’s saying much.
St. A you asked “Perhaps you could explain how it is to MSN’s advantage to portray their users as devious?”
To be perfectly frank, I can’t. (In fact, if you search the board you’ll find that about 3 or 4 months back, when the “user cafe gal” ad first aired I posted a thread asking what the spot was all about; I couldn’t believe that my interpretation of the commercial was right because it portrayed the protagonist in such an utterly unsypathetic way.) That’s why I think that MSN is in the process of shooting itself in the foot with their campaign – but who knows, maybe it’s connecting with the target audience which obviously does not include me.
I do have a theory, however, as to how these spots got created. I suspect that MSN wanted to attract young, hip females. Their research told them that such young women aspire to be percieved as smart stylish “bad girls” types (or probably closer to the mark, not “good girls” types). The ad agency was given their marching orders and they created these two spots, not intending (and probably not realizing) that they crossed the taste line in the process.
Men, women, black, white whatever – it doesn’t matter – those two MSN spots offend me on a very basic human level.
Yawn…I think this is the kind of race-baiting to which many posters to this thread are lamenting. Should all commercials reflect the population in general? No, advertizers market to specific demographics and so aim for specific groups – yes, at the expense of perceived “diversity.” This is why you’ll find a “disproportionately high” number of minorities on BET and UPN commercials, and far fewer during Must See TV. If the percentage of whites who watch “Friends” (to pick an arbitrary show) is twice the census percentage of whites, is it okay that they appear twice as often in the ads? Or should every program on every station follow a cast-in-stone melanin quota?
You suggest an incredibly misleading use of statistics, Swimming. I agree that race relations in mass media have a ways to go, but IMHO tv commercials are the wrong place to stir up a lather.
An awful lot of it depends on where you are. My mother, from Seattle, noticed that in Chicago we have many more Blacks in our commercials.
As an aside, has anybody seen the ad, I can’t remember what they’re selling, with the father playing with his toddler son and the father is White and the kid is “full-blooded” ( :rolleyes:, but I can’t think of a better word) Asian of some sort? I just thought it was a sweet ad. No calling attention to their “differences;” in fact, the father’s face is hardly seen. No explanation is thought necessary for how this family was formed. It just is, which is how it should be.
Space Vampire said, “But then, at least they showed a young Asian couple instead of a white guy with a Japanese girl.”
I’m not picking a fight, but is there something wrong with that? I am also seeing more “mixed” couples on commercials around here. Progress on out way to humans evening out to a uniform beige, as far as I can tell. It was inevitable as soon as isolated pockets of humanity stopped being isolated.
No, mixing is fine. Actually, I’m generally pro-mixing. But a lot of white guys have reprehensible attitudes towards Asian women that makes me kind of uncomfortable with some WM/AF pairings I see, (this is doubtless unfair to many such couples that are based on mutual respect, but I can’t shake the feeling, especially since I mostly see this on my campus, where guys are scum) and while you’ll see plenty of movies and TV shows that pair a white man and an Asian woman, you will very rarely (almost never) see the opposite. If anyone can name more shows or movies depicting these pairings than they can count on one hand I’ll be surprised. And “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” doesn’t count because it at least allegedly reflected reality.
You know, I don’t think I ever even noticed a difference in race. I’ve seen the commercial a bunch of times and it just never even clicked. Maybe its because I didn’t think that the commercial was saying “only black guys are messy eaters”…in fact, I didn’t even know the dude was black until you mentioned it and I really thought back about it. I don’t know what that means. It could just mean that the 3 guys were sitting there and that guy volunteered to be the one with cheese on his face. For all we know, his voice just didn’t carry the right timbre to say one of the other two lines. shrug Doesn’t even smell of racism to me.
I mean, you’ve got commercials like the ones for prgnancy tests and birth control pills where the girls are all about: “I’m just waiting until the time is right” “I want a baby, just not now” “One day we will be parents, but not today.” Where is the commercial for the woman who says “This isn’t something I want, ever.”???
We all know commercials stereotype according to race, gender, money, etc. We also know how frustrating that may be, because it can perpetuate the stereotypes even further than are already ingrained in us.
OTOH, isn’t that just getting the attention of your target audience? Isn’t that the whole point of advertising?
So let me get this straight. Your argument is that because there aren’t any minorities watching prime time network TV, that advertisers don’t want to sell to them. OK, I can buy that. But why do you think minorities aren’t watching Friends or the like? Because they’re written for and by whites, starring whites only, with the occational black guy as the sidekick or the black woman as the sassy best friend. The Cosby Show was brilliant because it didn’t portray the typical bafoonery that minorities are placed into.
So, yea. The advertising addresses the content. But then you have to look at the content. And the content shows that minorities are under-represented, and when they are included, it’s as a secondary comedic character. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that a majority of television programs take place in urban settings (I want to say 97%, from my media psych class, but that could be wrong) and that there are far more minorities in urban settings, even though the majority of the population lives in non-urban settings. So not only are they not representing the country, but when compaired with urban demos, it’s even MORE skewed. I could go into empirical data if you want, but somehow I think that might just make you yawn more.
So why care? When I was about 7 or 8, I saw Whoopi Goldberg do a character of a young black girl who put (IIRC) a pair of pants on her head and pretended she had “long, luxurious blonde hair.” I was in the second grade, and I knew something was very wrong with it. The media gives us all an image of what beauty is, and that’s a skinny, blonde white chick. That’s hard enough for white women to live up to, much less minority women. When TV ignores minorities, it sends a message that, much like your post, they don’t count demographically. But even worse is examples like my OP, where they’re just offensive. So yawn if you want, but it’s not because there isn’t a problem. It’s because you aren’t paying attention.
And for the record, if the soundtrack on the commercial had been different, I agree, there would have been very little to be offended by.
I don’t. I think they’re reflective of something, but I’m not quite sure what that something is.
In looking over the thread, and the examples mentioned, it seems to me that the advertising companies are trying for diversity and their attempt is making things worse than being totally non-inclusive. The Taco Bell commercial doesn’t come off badly at all (in this sense)IMHO, because its a dork (among other dorks) with cheese on his face who happens to be black. Because the commercial doesn’t point out, apply to, or in any way big deal out of his race, it works.
OTOH, with the MSN commercial, I get the idea that someone thought “let’s show asians using our product.” Followed by thoughts of “how do we make this more asian” and “this will be funny and asian” and so you end up with someone’s weird, inspired by kungfu movies idea of what it is to be asian - and the commercial ends up turning off the people it was meant to attract. They did the same thing with the other two “Let’s show an empowered woman” and they have her showing a screwed up idea of what that is - or an “independent teen” and instead of showing independence they showed an annoying kid. (What is the message there, “Get MSN for your home and your kid will defy all of your punishment!” oh, yeah - that’s a selling point.) ((I have similar feelings the same way about the trying for diversity Ford campaign about a year ago with dual spokesmen - which is one of the many reasons I will not be buying Ford/Lincoln/Mercury anytime soon.))