What is wrong with Mars, Inc./Masterfoods? Look at this Snickers commercial produced by Omnicon. The accompanying text is from AdAge critic Bob Garfield’s open letter to Omnicon CEO John Wren criticizing this tripe (h/t Joe.My.God):
In January 2007, from TBWA, New York, there was the Snickers Super Bowl ad: two auto mechanics, chewing on opposite ends of a candy bar till meeting in an accidental kiss. The incident struck them as so repulsively gay they commenced trying to cleanse themselves via a chest-hair-ripping display of manliness. The accompanying website offered alternate endings, such as one guy attacking the other with a wrench.
Now, from AMV BBDO, London, another Snickers spot, in which a butt-wiggling race walker is just too effeminate for Mr. T’s liking. The snarling scourge of all things sissified chases after the guy in a pickup. “You a disgrace to the man race!” he bellows. “It’s time to run like a real man!”—whereupon the terrorized wimp is mowed down with a candy-spewing Gatling gun and admonished to “Get some nuts!”
...This letter is to you, but it is equally to your colleagues throughout the industry. Are you so bereft, of ideas and simple humanity, that you must be reduced to stereotyping and bullying? That you must identify an “other” to ridicule, or worse? That you must build a brand on the backs of people who have harmed no one save for challenging a high-school locker-room standard of masculinity?
Bil at The Bilerico Project is incensed—“I will never buy a Snickers bar again.”
You might recall that during the last Snickers dust up, the company trotted out a spokesbot with this corporate defense:
“As with all of our Snickers advertising, our goal was to capture the attention of our core Snickers consumer, primarily 18-to-24-year-old adult males,” said a spokeswoman for Masterfoods, Alice Nathanson. “Feedback from our target consumers has been positive, and many media and Web site commentators on this year’s Super Bowl lineup ranked the commercial among this year’s best.”
You can contact Snickers here.
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As is so often the case with products like this, I already avoid them, so I can’t exactly boycott them. Of course, the company doesn’t know that…