<blockquote>Our consumer doesn’t want to be slaving away in the kitchen, but she may not feel great about just pulling something out of the freezer and putting it in the microwave<blockquote>

I know plenty of people who like to cook, but they occasionally do want to pull something out of the freezer and heat it in the microwave.  It’s called leftovers.  Have these people never heard of the concept of taking the food that you don’t consume, putting it in a container, and freezing it for later use?  And those people would rather eat their food heated in the microwave rather than buy some overpriced processed crap?

The mind, it boggles.  A blacksmith?  For food?  That’s a bit much.

“The Devil finds work for idle hands”

Recognizing that women are sometimes not gestating, or transporting the kids to/from soccer practice, or baking cookies for the school bake sale, the geniuses at Kraft thoughtfully stepped up to provide a humble yet wise solution for keeping the American woman fully occupied with the process of daily life, lest she be tempted to sue for equal pay, or advocate for Planned Parenthood, or march in rallies in support of unions, or some such nonsense.

And remember, this is certainly not limited to progressive women either.  Imagine how much better the American social and political landscape would be if back in the day Phylis Schlafly just had too much housework to do to kill the ERA, or Michele Bachmann had too much to become a tax attorney?

See, the Patriarchy isn’t all bad…

If I really wanted ’ the meal to be hands-on, and for the meal to come from [my] hands and [my] heart.”  Why would I be using Velveeta?  That’s plastic cheese, right?  There seems to be a bizarre disconnect in a junk food producer insisting on ‘home cooked’ meals.

What I focus on in that commercial is how creeped out she is by the whole scenario.  “Why is this stranger trying to molest me using high cholestrol almost-cheese?”

Wow.

I remember reading that when they first came up with box mixes for things like cake and pancakes, they found that women felt so guilty with it being so easy (just add water) that they had to go reformulate them so you had to add eggs and milk so women didn’t feel like such failures as homemakers.

I can’t believe that they’re still at it, but coming from the other direction, now trying to force that guilt.

Love how the assumption still is that it’s the woman who’s doing the cooking. If it was a commercial aimed at a man, they sure as hell wouldn’t be playing the “this is too easy, where is your sense of craftsmanship” card with a box of Velveeta.

Lymis, I’m sure it didn’t hurt the companies to realize that making eggs and milk things to add to cake mixes also made the manufacture of those cake mixes less expensive.

But on to the issue, I don’t see this as a betrayal of the goal of the back-to-the-kitchen-voluntarily movement. Most of the home-cooking stuff I see among friends isn’t for everyday kinds of things, but a series of special things. Healthy? Not by a long shot in many cases. Homemade pizza is still pizza. Homemade pie is still a bit sugar-intensive. Homemade cakes, even from scratch, aren’t exactly healthy dining. The breadmakers get a good month or two of use, that smoothie blender might be trendy, but the typical average stereotypical American consumer (maybe Consumer should be capitalized, too) goes back to the default mode with home cooking just as it does so with exercise programs and all the other self-improvement methods. And they never lie in surveys regarding church attendance, either.

The ads are stupid and pandering to women, expecting a blacksmith to be seen as the sexy he-man women will want to cook Velveta-laden fare for. But I’m sadly aware that it’s just an attempt by Kraft or whatever big corporation makes that dreck to sell that in things other than Lunchables, that Frankenstein’s Monster of Maternal Guilt.

In my cynical moments I believe that the second wave women’s movement got as far as it did only because its message could be spun as squeezing more toil out of women.  She’ll clean and cook and earn!  A week or so ago Time magazine ran a female-authored cover story saying that even though men still aren’t doing their fair share of housework, they’re putting in equal time if you count housework the same as hanging out in the office clicking away at a desktop computer or shooting the breeze.  So shut up, bitchez.

MikeEss had it right upthread, as usual.

There seemed to be a lot of social resentment against women just being able to pull a frozen steak or chicken and frozen veg out and pop it on the stove and call it dinner back when frozen food started coming into style, like they were getting away with something.  If I had to guess, it’s just a fast food manufacturer using a double whammy of free-floating misogynist resentment and fat-panic to try to piggy-back on the slow-food movement in the most ridiculous way possible.

I honestly don’t see how frying Velveeta and steak together is exploiting fat panic. It strikes me as a breaking concerns about weight free of concerns about home cooking.

I work in advertising, and I think I can spin a plausible scenario for how this crazy ad came to be, with the caveat that I don’t know anything about Velveeta or who did this ad.  It may be way off, but I’d bet cash money it went something like this:

First, you’re pretty much stuck with the product you’re promoting.  Velveeta has its role, and that role is to help make terrible nachos and mac and cheese.  I’m guessing they have research indicating that their main competitors are pre-made microwave meals, so the ad needs to take them on.  They’ll also have research saying that the main reason people choose microwave meals over Velveeta mac and cheese is time, so they’ve decided to make the case that it isn’t THAT much more time.  It’s aimed at women because that’s still who does the majority of cooking, and they probably chose the blacksmith for comic juxtaposition: big guy with smaller woman, and he’s a blacksmith because cooking looks like a lot less work, and less hot, by comparison.  If my experience holds true, this all took place very quickly, and they grabbed the first slightly funny idea anyone had and held on for dear life.  They may have presented two ideas and let the client choose.  If it existed, the second idea may well have been clever and fresh and challenged stereotypes.  Most everyone wants to embrace that sort of idea, but ultimately don’t have the nerve.  The team that came up with the idea was probably at least half female, but the clients were probably mostly, or all, male.

They’ll be working from data saying that their primary customer is a middle aged woman with a family (that’s almost always who the primary customer is), with a secondary customer who’s a guy in college.  So if they make two ads, the second one might be aimed at the guy.  Odds are the scenario will be similar, but they’ll replace the blacksmith with a woman who does hard work, maybe a Rosie the Riveter type, plus, she’ll be sexy.

Consumer culture is pretty rotten.  Advertising is designed to appeal to the status quo and its almost always inherently conservative in the worst sense of the word.  We tend to remember interesting or challenging ads because they’re so rare, but even that occasional impulse has been co-opted by the idea that shocking and funny equals challenging, edgy, and subversive.  And realistically, who wants to be challenged by an ad for manufactured cheese food product during “Two and a Half Men”?  And what do you do when the product itself is the product of the status quo circa 1950?

It probably is just an irrational desire to make women work harder for no other reason than they’re stupid bitches who need to show more effort around here.

The more time I spend on the internet, the more I realize this is true. Dudes get a lot meaner when they can hide behind anonymity.

“I honestly don’t see how frying Velveeta and steak together is exploiting fat panic. It strikes me as a breaking concerns about weight free of concerns about home cooking.”

It struck me as more along the lines of Kentucky Fried Chicken rebranding themselves as KFC.  The fat-panic thing we’re going through has resulted in this squishy cultural conviction that homecooked==good for you (see also, jackholes in the organic and slow-food movements telling women to get back in the kitchen lest their children catch a case of deathfat), which can be exploited by someone like Velveeta by touting more labor-intensive products over heat-and-eat products. 

If you can slap a patina of homecooking and consequent healthfulness, which we all know will magically make people not-fat, on your Orange Cheese Product by guilting your lady-consumers into doing more work with it, you shift blame and, if your more work-intensive products have a better profit-margin, make a buck in doing so.  Though without access to internal marketing research and memos, I’m not exactly married to my interpretation.

Winged Beast @4: No, she’s disturbed because of that third set of hands over the skillet.

I don’t want my cooking compared to horseshoes, even if I do use velveeta (or storebrand knock off) without irony, when I can afford it.  I don’t give a damn how he forges his horseshoes as long as my horse is shod. I live in Memphis with no air conditioning. Microwave and crockpot, cold soulless technology—operative word being COLD—here I come.  I believe in a shiny future with rubber jumpsuits, shining towers of glass and steel and flying cars, not one of more labor where I work a 10 hour day and come home for more work still,

Misogyny aside, I’m always amused when Processed Food Brand A tries to claim that it’s more “real” than Processed Food Brand B, usually according to some completely arbitrary standard like whether you keep it in the freezer or the pantry.

But yeah, the “Ladies, shouldn’t you be spending more time in the kitchen?” subtext is also pretty infuriating.

I’m stating the obvious here, but it’s a man telling a woman how to cook.

Annnnnnnnd not a chef, but someone in a field completely unrelated, mansplaining.

Even tho this is supposed to be a joke, imaginary situation, still.

The reason he is a blacksmith is because the implication is that he forged the skillet that he gives the woman for her to cook with.

The reason he’s a blacksmith is that the woman in the ad would love to cook for a blacksmith, as lumberjacks have that environmental and Monty Python connotation, construction workers are 20% of the Village People, soldiers are on the other side of the planet, the barbaric warriors are shilling for credit cards, and the cowboys all died of lung cancer.

Lymis @ 5, The Feminine Mystique is probably where you read that. Friedan asserted that it was part of making housework seem more difficult and requiring of super special feminine knowledge so that smart women were less likely to feel bored and unappreciated in the home.

I think to the general public mind the obesity equation goes 1) busy working mom 2) ??? 3)DEATH FAT!!!
And the media are always covering studies about how working mothers are more likely to have obese children etc that sort of give the impression that obesity is caused by evil convenience magic rather than by calories and how filling the food is etc. See also ads implying that refined sugar instead of HFCS makes something healthy when the two foods are almost equally as bad. This commercial fits nicely with the narrative that rising obesity rates are a moral failing.

Haven’t eaten Velveeta in decades (upon decades), but it was standard in the 1950s kitchen, like my mother’s.

And then, if memory serves, it may have been advertised as one of those time saving aids for cooks, melted faster or something like that there.

So when women were stuck in the house doing nothing but housewifery (exceptions to that of course, but that was the assumption 60 years ago), Velveeta was advertised as a time saver.

And now that women have less time for housewifery what with full time jobs outside the home, it’s being advertised as something one would want to take more time.

Huh.

This is disgusting on too many levels to even discuss.  I have always done the cooking, even when I was married, and have generally done so from scratch.  It takes no longer, and very little more effort, than these abominations and has far less salt and none of the preservatives and other chemicals.  When my son was growing up, I made my own versions of hamburger helper, which were healthier and tasted better.  I am also proud to say that he does most of the cooking now that he is married and has a family of his own.

My 75 year old father watched that commercial and wondered who on earth couldn’t just melt their own cheese.

I don’t see how frying cheese is going to be hugely labor-intensive, either.

Remember “Wid whiz?” Cheese-eating surrender monkeys? The type of cheese in important, and Velveeta is American cheese.

I think it’s clear where this ad campaign will wind up.

Amanda, apparently this ain’t happening:

The Shawshank principle, by the way, is why I’m convinced that Tim Pawlenty is going to win the Republican nomination.

MSNBC just reported that T-Paw is finished - he’s withdrawing from the race today. I never thought he would win, and lately I’ve thought that he wouldn’t even make it to the Iowa Caucus in January, but I was pretty shocked to see him drop out this fast. Looks like a poll that doesn’t even count destroyed any hope he had. I’m guessing he’s figured out what most people probably know already - the fight for the GOP nomination is going to be between two candidates, and he ain’t one of them. Forget Gingrich, Bachmann, Cain, Huntsman, or Johnson - the Repuke nominee will either be Mitt Romney or Rick Perry, and nobody else. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m thinking it’s probably gonna be Perry, which completely scares the shit out of me. I have little faith in the electorate being able to see that however much they might think Obama is the root cause of our economic troubles, his GOP opponent will most certainly make things several magnitudes of order worse. If Governor Goodhair is standing on the podium in front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2013 taking the oath to become our 45th POTUS, I’m getting the fuck out of here.

Shit, posted the above comment in the wrong thread. Sorry about that.

The entire national concern about food is really just a disguised desire to make women work harder for no reason whatsoever.

I wouldn’t say the entire concern, but there are decidedly corners where that’s the case.

I don’t think Velveeta should be engaging this target as a marketing strategy, but as the Anti-vax, “natural birth” and related movements show, there is clearly someone who seems to think the problem with the world is that, regardless of how much has been done, women haven’t done enough. I could easily see this group rejecting a microwave because “a meal is just that much more satisfying with a little extra effort” or some similar bit of woo.

Here’s a fun fact, people: “1950s housewife” is now a code phrase among spanking enthusiasts.
http://www.takeninhand.com/node/1633
The comparison is unfair, though: spankers are only in favor of consensual domination.

Yes, they’re definitely trying to convince women that they should take extra effort to make the meal.  Not that it’s magically healthier, but she should feel bad about getting fast food or using the microwave because women are supposed to slave over the stove for their families.  The value added is purely in letting her feel like a 50s housewife so that she has permission not to feel guilty for falling short in that area.  The way they show the food actually emphasizes its 1950’s “regrettable food” aspect; it’s the opposite of a suggestion of healthiness.  They’re advertising that a woman should be a 1950’s housewife- here is the product that will let her cook the old-fashioned comfort food she had when she was a kid, back when men were men dammit.

In other words, it’s an appeal to nostalgia.  I think the problem is, we’re too nostalgic.

Well, think about it.

If you were a producer of unhealthy near zero nutritional food that was the closest possible embodiment of “useless junk food” of pure unloved garbage that only the desperate or tasteless would buy and you heard about a campaign that included the VP of the fucking country to basically make people notice what foods are nutritional and what are heart-attacks in a can that would be better off cut out, would you:

A) Accept your fat. Acknowledge the faults and maybe accept that you’ll have lower sales and move more of the business into developing a deceptively labeled “Reduced Fat” Velvetta and attacking the real cheese industry for causing heart attacks.

or

B) Accept that you’re evil and realize that what people like more than sneering at fat people is sneering at women perceived to be “lazy” in any way and trying to shift attention to them and their whore mouths so no one notices that you make what many societies would consider to be an abomination against man and God.

Given that their souls calcified into living rock ages ago, they decided that option B was more profitable and easier to do as that way they didn’t have to produce new products or risk creating a backlash against real cheese and fake cheese alike.

Thus this ad.

I agree with Angelia. Memphians unite! BTW: everyone knows that the true role of velveeta is use in rotel dip.

Back in the day, a woman’s job was taking care of the home (let’s just ignore reality and go with the 1950s Hollywood version), so if she wasn’t slaving away over a hot stove, vacuum, or washer/dryer, then she was just lazy and must be sitting around all day eating chocolates, watching soap operas, and getting fat. Anything that made her life easier made her lazier. Once women started working outside the home in real numbers, convenience foods became a status symbol. So yeah, it’s nostalgia for good ol’ days that never existed, and perhaps a reason to argue that women should quit their jobs, stay home, and cook “real” food.  “For the good of her family”, of course. </snark>

A few years ago I heard a radio interview with a representative of a frozen food company. Bird’s Eye, I think, though I could be wrong. They said they could sell the exact same product in a plastic tray that can be microwaved, or in a bag that had to be cut open, the contents put in a pan and cooked on the stove. And they’d done focus groups and discovered that their customers want to dirty a pan, so they’d feel like they were really cooking. Seems likely that Velveeta is going with the same idea.

I like how the kraft brands website seems to be missing velveeta today.

Darcy, I can believe that:  Since I never eat their version of the product, I don’t need to use the cook-in-bag stuff, so I don’t buy those frills.  Those frills also cost more.  Without those frills, it’s easier to modify their recipe or use their ingredients in my own recipe.  Far more flexibility.

I’m a guy who does all the cooking in my household, and I don’t think it can be that big a mystery that Velveeta is perceived as “not real” food, and that people don’t want to give their families a meal that was cooked in a microwave.

This is advertising that would be just as effective on me as a woman.  I don’t want to give my family a meal cooked in the microwave, and I don’t want to give my family a “pasteurized processed cheese food”.  Velveeta has to overcome this.  That’s how advertising works.

Re: **Comment #10: AstroCat1138**

I agree totally.  I’d wager that is how that ad came to be.  If the competitor for velveeta is the boxed or microwave dinners, the ad is a way to entice people to use it. 

Personally the only thing I use velveeta for is to mix with salsa and pork sausage and have a heart attack friendly dip.  It decidedly isn’t for a health conscious meal.

Advertising is designed to get people to purchase a given product or indirect advertising to create a favorable impression or minimize an unfavorable impression of a company (think of the BP ads post Gulf Spill) .

Advertising has never been used to create a favored sociological understanding of gender relations or other broader social concerns.  It would only be that way if advertisers thought that people wanted to be preached to.  This ad is basically saying, it doesn’t take much more time to make something with Velveeta and it will taste better and taste more ‘home made’. 

Ultimately the market will decide if this ad works.  If it results in an increase of sales for Velveeta or more favorable impressions in focus groups, expect more of it.  If it fails to improve Velveeta’s image, expect fewer of those ads.

DarcyPennell,
If it was Bird’s Eye and they were talking vegetables (as opposed to ready meals), part of the reasons may be the ones I have for preferring a bag.
1) I often only use parts of various plain frozen vegetables to create my own mixes and that is more easily done with a bag than a “pan”.
2) I already have pans to cook in, will not be making only vegetables and don’t need additional waste from the “pan. 
3) Any included items tend to add more cost than their convenience is worth and/or be too flimsy, thin, heat transferring, etc.

Actually, I think velveeta’s marketing team is probably right in that women are under huge pressure to bring back the “family meal” and to create healthy meals both of which can easily be confused in an emotional way with “meals that take more time”.  What I mean is I doubt anyone actually thinks velveeta is healthier than a frozen lasagna, but we live in a culture which exerts itself in subtle ways. So a woman may still feel better having made something in a skillet than microwaving something she probably knows is just as bad.

This discussion reminds me of what one of my aunts who married into the Avenger family said to my mom one time:

“An Avenger will eat anything you cook, even if it’s shit, as long as you’re at the stove for hours stirring the pot.”

Re:  #40 helen w. h.

I love the bags of veggies that you can cook by just putting them in the microwave.  It makes getting the meal together so much easier.  Saves the time for cleanup and I am less tempted to add salt or other stuff to the veggies when cooking.

Block of Velveeta + can of Hormel chili + pound of Jimmy Dean sausage + Crock-Pot = delicious dip for Fritos.  It’s a heart attack in a bucket, and it’s delicious. 

Also, frozen vegetables should always come in a bag, not a pan, so that they can be used as ice packs for ankle sprains, etc.  We do not eat frozen peas, ever, but we always have a bag in the freezer for first aid uses.

Ah, I see Wallace is back, as deaf to gender issues as ever…

Comment #41: carovee, I agree with that. Just look at Sandra Lee Semi Homemade show. Every can of concentrated soup or box of flavored rice has a “How to make it a meal” recipe on it. It allows people to feel like they are really cooking without having to actually make anything from scratch. “Hey, I browned chicken and diced it up to add to the rice, therefore I cooked.”

Pre-packaged foods prey on the notion that they cut down on prep/cooking time, but I’ve rarely found that to be the case except where they’re a frozen version of a fancy dish with a special sauce or something. It goes without saying, buy I’m gonna say it anyway: tossing a bag of frozen vegetables into a covered dish and microwaving it for about 5 minutes, and adding butter, salt, fresh or dried herbs, whatever, takes the same amount of time as most convenience foods and is cheaper. The same can be said for fresh vegetables if you spend another 2 minutes chopping them. There’s an amazing sauce made from garlic, ginger, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar and butter that goes on anything. Microwave time: 1 minute. Even spooning a pre-prepared sauce over home-microwaved veggies is cheaper and tastier (usually) than a pre-packaged version of the same. I guess this sounds kind of preachy, and I understand the craving for the flavors in the pre-packaged food, but the tastiness of pre-packaged food is rarely the appeal; 90% of what usually prevents me from making a homemade dish is the misguided notion that it’s a pain in the ass and/or not as delicious as the pre-packaged version which, by the way, usually turns out to be less appealing than what’s pictured on the packaging.

carovee @ 41 -  yes, absolutely.  And it would be a mistake to assume that this pressure is coming only from right-wing traditionalists.  Progressive food writers (*cough* Pollan *cough*) have been known to shade into this wistful nostalgia about how much Better it was Way Back Then when people cooked and didn’t rely on the processed stuff.  Which conveniently ignores the fact that the person doing the cooking was called “Mom” and wasn’t really given a lot of choice in the matter. 

That, and any parent generally and mother specifically will tell you that it is all to easy to be made to feel guilty about the quality of one’s parenting (especially mothering).  It literally starts with breastfeeding and never, ever stops.  I’m convinced that the only reason “Supernanny” remains on the air is because it permits average parents some relief from the guilt that their parenting isn’t super.

I’ve worked for Kraft.  I know the people involved.  Carovee and jevmom are spot on.  Women put themselves under a lot of pressure, and your average working mother trying to juggle it all doesn’t have the luxury that Amanda does with her CSA and her time consuming, high skill-required recipes.  Amanda doesn’t prep these meals with a baby or toddler underfoot, and she works out of her home.  So can (pun intended) the hipster snobbiness about preprepared foods.

Susanne @50: But if the dumb cows had refrained from breeding in the first place, they wouldn’t have rugrats underfood and they could cook organic healthy slow food meals for their totally equal partner/husband/boyride, amirite?

To be a little less hard on Amanda, if you’re not a parent you may really not get the full weight of that cultural expectation that Mom Is Supposed to Cook, and “cook” does not mean “throw shit in the microwave”, because of course that is a sign that she has other things to do with her life than put her husband and children first every waking second. We all know how the patriarchy treats that.

And no, this is not knew or exotic. My copy of the I Hate to Cook Book (written by a housewife in the 1960s who, yes, hated to cook but was still expected to be the household chef) has a bit about buying rolls instead of making home-made. She recommends that the first time the reader serves them to her husband, that one should dither about “oh, I don’t know, these just don’t taste right” and “I’m sure these aren’t as good as usual” so that one’s husband exasperatedly says that they’re fine, they’re just as good as they always are, what’s the problem. Thus neatly preventing him from ever complaining that she buys bread instead of making it from scratch.

Alex, that’s because she has children, which means she’s gets to bash Amanda for being a childless hipster, regardless of what Amanda actually wrote on this blog.

My biggest obstacle to providing healthy meals is not my toddler, I can count on her to eat quick things like chopped fresh fruit or whole wheat toast and that keeps her out of my hair so I can cook. It’s that my husband is infinitely pickier and would seriously rather eat Velveeta mess than any kind of healthy anything. Can lead a horse to water, etc etc.

Why does it make any difference if crapola comes from a pan or a microwave?  It’s still crapola.  That’s why my parents never used hamburger helper and the like - if you know how to cook, you can do simple stuff that isn’t crap.

We have a couple of meals a week that go from freezer to table for the most part - the ones prepared by the teenagers.  These still typically involve some fresh content, or at least rice or pasta or sliced veggies and such.  This frees me and my husband up to do meals from scratch - which we all prefer.  I don’t see how this velveeta crapola would save me any time, any money, or any effort over just chopping up some damn veggies and making chili like I did last night.

Is that too revolutionary and indulgent - making my teenagers cook 1 meal a week, each?  By gawd, they might harm themselves!  I’m a bad mom.

Ms Kate, amoungst my wifes’ people, you would be considered a parent who doesn’t indulge their children, since it is expected that men as well as women should be able to cook, and that teenagers in general should be helping you by cooking or at least doing prep work while Mom puts the final stuff together.

My wife’s anecdotal precautionary tale about the wisdom of this advice was about her parental grandmother(lulu), who was raised in an upper-class family, and never learned to cook.  Because all the servants had the day off because of a fiesta or something, there was nobody to make rice(make steamed rice) for lulu to eat, so she had to go to a relative’s nearby who she knew would be able to meet her needs and relieve her hunger.

It was a big revelation to me to find that if I was content with a relatively unvaried diet, I could have healthy food that wasn’t a huge deal to prepare.  The trick is to do lots of things that are sauteed quickly, cook in slow cookers, and use the rotisserie chickens and tofu bricks. 

Mix up the sauces, and you have a steady diet of things that are good for you and very little work.  When you get tired of it, you have a natural motivation to put in the time for occasional special meals.

Considering there is a “cook your own meals” dynamic in our culture, so strong that goofy bloggers like Amanda even try to tap into the zeitgeist by giving blogspace over to the fad, I can definitely see why any food manufacturor would try to advertise ways to prepare phony food like real food to make people feel better about their product.

Making your own meals from scratch isn’t just about eating healthy, it’s about accomplishment. Going to the store, buying lean ground beef, mixing eggs and onions into it, melting your own cheese on top, cutting up a tomato, it’s more rewarding than just going to the McDonald’s, and probably a lot healthier.

I can only imagine Amanda’s whining about unrealistic imagery if a dad was making dinner for the family, so I guess Velveeta must just surrender, and do something, because no matter what they do, haters gonna hate.

Seriously, there isn’t a Star Chamber somewhere who decides that ad campaigns will be about dehumanizing women. This stuff is focus group tested, and tested some more, and then test run in a few markets, and then tested some more for awareness and reaction. But Amanda had ad-space to sell, here, and if blaming every inconvenience in life or any perceived slur on a evil cabal of old white men whose only aim is to force women back into the kitchen drives page hits, and thus, ad rates, so be it.

You know, I just saw that commercial for the first time. The only good thing about it was the “what the fuck…” expression on the woman’s face. The rest was just dumb.

This stuff is focus group tested, and tested some more, and then test run in a few markets, and then tested some more for awareness and reaction.

I would bet garbage to doornails that this was true of this Yoplait commercial as well.