Or an African(-American) refusing to buy a Ford because of slavery or lynching that took place in the US. again: :rolleyes:
Hm. Was this directed at me?
Anyhow, this isn’t the place for this, but if you wish to discuss it further, you know where to take it.
Back to the OP: A few years ago I was watching a documentary about the propaganda campaign the Nazis used to convince health-care workers that it was a really good idea to kill their mentally ill and mentally retarded patients. It was all evil and scary, of course, and during every commercial break the first thing you heard was the narrator of an Audi commercial bragging about German engineering. Coincidence?
Just to deliberately take the slightly ambiguous thread title the wrong way for the sake of my posts score, I’d like to state publicly that unless your ad says “COKE”, or “SEROXAT: PROZAC WITHOUT THE DEPRESSION” (;)) or something equally short and punchy, there’s NO point in putting it on the back of a BUS.
cite: the ONE ad the rally advertisers could afford for a local Pentecostal rally, in a (still) anonymous local park, which I chased frantically around the city for ten minutes, because the only details identifying the location and date were on the very bottom in the smallest print and I couldn’t read them without being directly behind.
Now that I’ve got your attention, why is it that these new green lurex dancing tights go baggy at the knees after only a couple of nights’ fun?
[Bette Midler] Ross - get off your knees! [/Bette Midler]
Redboss
Thing 1: In advertising class, we were taught that “memorable” is sometimes all they care about. You may hate the commercial, but you’ll never forget it. Guess that’s what Carl’s Jr. (“If it doesn’t drip all over the place, it doesn’t go in your face”) was going for.
Thing 2: The newspaper where I work published a special section containing the entire Starr report. Guess what was on the back of it…a full page ad for a cigar store. Talk about tacky.
You were taught that in advertising class? I’ll never understand why ad people think this way. If they produce a negative ad with a certain product, I’ll associate that product with negative images.
Neither of these is a good analogy, and a rolleyes doesn’t do much for the cause of fighting ignorance. In fact, the combination of two suggests that there’s some ignorance that needs fighting here, so I’ll continue the highjack for a moment…
The cotton analogy is the somewhat better of the two - cotton-good producers directly benefitted from slave labor’s supressing of raw cotton prices. The difference, however, is that although the United States was among the last countries to ban slavery, the bans had come into effect in most places only within the generation or so prior to 1865. With the end of our civil war, the revulsion at slavery became pretty-well unanimous, so by the time Germany reimposed it no moral ambiguity could provide cover for their decisions. Furthermore, the dominant view appears to be that by 1944 Nazism had so corrupted and infiltrated the entire German economy that really no-one could pretend to be unaware of the camps or slave labor.
The great disappointment is that after the war, these same industrialists largely received a “free pass” because of the need to revivify the western German economy and integrate it into the anti-Communist cause. The Nuremberg trials raised expectations, then disappointed them because for many they simply didn’t go far enough into the civilian Nazi system.
Ergo, the boycotts, which apparently have a pretty long pedigree in Jewish history. According to my friend, only within the last ten years or so have the most prominent rabbis lifted the ban on travel to Spain and Portugal imposed during the Inquisition. Jews have a 5,000-year history, and are not inclined to just “get over it,” particularly when “it” is unparalelled slaughter.
As for my own opinion…well, I’m not much for visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, and the sad reality is that the right people weren’t punished in 1946. It means that justice was never properly served, but there is nothing we mortals can do at this time that will really rectify the balance. The payment of reparations doesn’t quite cut it, although for many it will do in lieu of a more proper accounting.
(My friend’s family has the receipt the SS gave his grandfather when the family watch shop was expropriated.)
[Professor Kingsfield]Now, AndYrAStar, would you perhaps like to explain why your analogy to Ford is so poorly reasoned that this will constitute my only reply to it?[/Professor Kingsfield]
Sorry about yet another hijack:
IMO, I can perfectly understand why holocaust survivors and their families would take issue still at buying German made products. It is still a very fresh memory, still painful, and the association is still too lurid. If your grandmother/father told you about working as a slave for a certain company, would you be able to brush off that memory after their death, or even during their life, and get said product because it was, in your mind, a good decision for you? I wouldn’t. It would be very easy for me to specifically exclude that product from the decision-making process for me.
I never specifically knew any slaves from American history, never met one, nor have I ever met a slave owner or anyone who directly earned their fortune from slave labor. Big difference.
I remember when I was in Spain I went to some historical synogogue. Some American rabbi was there the same day and refused to pay admission. Kind of ironic, considering they use the money to maintain the damn place!
I’ve had two experiences like that.
I remember that while watching footage of the Oaklahoma federal building bombing the news cut away for a commercial. It was for Energizer batteries and involved two evil scientist types trying to sabotage the Energizer bunny (that one with the drum that keeps going, and going…) by putting a bunch of dynamite in it’s path…(( groan )). I never saw that commercial ever again. I guess they yanked it real quick.
Just yesterday there was news coverage of a horrible pit-bull attack where three dogs dragged a boy of his bicycle. Cut to commercial: That Iams dog food commercial with the dog chasing a boy on a bike…
That’s both hilarious and very, very disturbing. But…hilarious!
My similar experience came while I was watching a documentary about a South American tribe that was particularly violent and gruesome in their bloody sacrifices (archaelogists had excavated a “landing site” for their innumerable victims). The show had just detailed how marks on the bones suggest the meat had been stripped from the dead’s bones and possibly consumed (if not just stripped to add to suffering), and the detail was gut-wrenchingly twisted.
Cut to: “BABY BACK RIBS!” …a super close-up of BBQ-sauce drenched ribs, which looked quite a bit like blood-soaked flesh. So smooth was the transition from TV show to commercial, it took me a beat or two to realize what had happened.
Yeeecccch.
I once was watching an episode of Quincy where he had just revealed the cause of a woman’s death (bad diet pills) when the station cut to commercial. Yep, the first commercial was for some diet pill.
You guys think that commercials can be placed badly? Try entire TV shows.
The day, literally, day after the Oklahoma City Bombing, my friend and I are watching TV.
“Oooh! Rerun of MacGuyver!” (Hey, we were young and stupid)
Anyway, the plot of this episode was MacGuyver trying to stop an evil villain who was on his way to blow up a building.
With a fertilizer bomb.
Inside of a delivery truck.
We were just watching in complete shock. Needless to say, MacGuyver saved the day, but damn, was that stupid.
Nit to pick:
Actually, Hitler & Co. were first runner-up. Stalin & Co. take the prize for unparalleled slaughter (~20M dead). The big difference was that Stalin was an equal-oportunity butcher, not focused like Hitler.
For two days in a row, during the heaviest fighting in Sierra Leone, the Globe and Mail had full page reports about this, in the corner of those pages, an add for a diamond store.
It wasn’t from show to commercial, but from commercial to commercial.
Driving along, listening to the radio. Three locally produced commercials come on in a row. The same DJ does the voice-over for all three.
Aditional nit to pick. The answer Tranquilis as usual is it depends. It depends on what you are using as a the definition of slaughter.
The following stats are from the Historical Atlas of the 20th Century. http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm
Now I do disagree with the author’s decision to place all European war dead at Hitler’s feet. But an arguement could be made that ultimately he is responsible. In any case enough of an arguement could be made for any of the three for most evil b@$!&#d of the 20th century to make the title holder disputed.
The Ford Winstar had a commercial in the 1980s comparing the van’s shape to that of the Space Shuttle. I saw the ad and broke out laughing because the Shuttle has terrible aerodynamics, and has been compared to a flying brick or a wrench…
… but then the ads were suddenly pulled in January 1986, when the Challenger blew up.