The Baboon Congress

Rainbow TV

Video 63 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Steve Grooms

It is fun and instructive to consider the social messages hidden in TV commercials. The people who make commercials concentrate so hard on making the big sell that they often send other messages that are more interesting than the main one.

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In earlier discussions here on the Trail we noted that it now seems that men are fair game in ads, often being depicted as buffoons. Women are usually presented as wise and adult. That, of course, is a total switch from the way gender was presented in the earlier days of television. Women then were shown as silly, empty-headed shoppers whom their husbands tolerated because they were attractive.

I easily remember when African-Americans never appeared in commercials. When that became controversial in the 1970s, blacks began showing up in ads, especially if the ad featured several white faces with maybe one dark one among them. Happily enough, over the years blacks have appeared in so many commercials that I think few audience members pay any attention to blacks in ads now.

I was puzzled the other day when I noticed that relatively few Hispanics are shown in commercials. That seems odd, particularly in view of how politically important that demographic has become. Then I remembered that Hispanics have many Spanish language channels. Madison Avenue must feel that is where Hispanic actors should be prominent in commercials.

The issue that has intrigued me most is the still-touchy area of interracial dating. I have carefully watched commercials, hoping to spot the first one to show romantic partners of mixed races. To my surprise, in one week earlier this year I saw interracial relationships featured in two prominent commercials. Both are still running.

The first one that I noticed was a State Farm commercial that showed an Asian man partnered with a light-skinned African-American woman. And indeed, they have a child in a stroller. This is the ad where a mime tells the couple about a great Sate Farm policy. The infant in the stroller says, “Am I the only one here who finds it weird that the mime is talking? Freaky!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAPxKiKlBUA

Just days after seeing that commercial I saw a romantic, impressionistic commercial for Apple iPhones with cameras. That ad has many quick cuts, one of which presents an attractive young couple posing for a photo together. A Caucasian male is apparently dating a light-skinned African-American woman. Apple has a similar ad running now with a couple that very well could be biracial, but both young people are so Goth in appearance that nobody could say what races they represent! You have to look fast – it’s at the :46 second mark.

http://youtu.be/NoVW62mwSQQ

It was fun to see two commercials that were not afraid to show relationships crossing
racial lines, but I told myself that I would probably not live long enough to see a commercial with a black man married to a white woman. That flaunts the most potent racial taboo of all.

http://youtu.be/kYofm5d5Xdw

Well, I was wrong. There is a commercial now running for Cheerios in which a white woman is in a relationship with a black man, and they have a child. The ad cleverly pulls its punch by not showing the black guy and white woman in the frame at the same time, but that did not save it from controversy.

That ad by Minnesota’s own General Mills has ignited a firestorm of bigotry.

In spite of the controversy, General Mills defends the ad and continues to run it. I wonder how long it will be before this controversy seems odd to us all. And I wonder how many years it will be before we see a gay couple in a commercial.

Have you seen something interesting in a television commercial lately?

63 thoughts on “Rainbow TV”

  2. Darn! My new skill of posting a video doesn’t seem to have worked. Oh well, this is a priceless depiction showing why men and women have difficulty communicating.

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  3. Good morning. There are some ads on TV these days that I find completely confusing. I don’t remember any details so I can’t give you an example. It seems ad people will show just about anything to try to get your attention. Some of these odd attention getting ads are so strange that I can’t figure out what it is that they are promoting.

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    1. I know exactly what you mean, Jim. I rarely watch tv (partly because I don’t have cable and the Twins games are not on regular tv!!!!) but when I do watch, there are many ads where I’m left scratching my head, wondering what the point is. It’s not just because I’m old and dumb, either, because if my 18-year-old daughter (who is anything but old and dumb) is also watching, she doesn’t understand them either.

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  5. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Nice work Steve.

    It is summertime and I am not watching much TV. A year ago after we installed invisible fence for our dog and cut the TV cable, we ended our cable subscription. Comcast messed up the appointment to repair the line (at our cost) 3 times, and we gave up on them. The Customer Service people in India could not seem to get the appointment communicated to the actual repair man in Minnesota. So we cancelled the service, then discovered the joy of antenna TV in the 21st Century. Specifically we discovered the joy of reruns, which is all we watch in the Summertime. It’s the good stuff–Bob Newhart, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, MASH—and on and on.

    The ads on those channels are REALLY CHEESY–a testosterone supplement, a walk-in bathtub, an electric cart to keep me mobile, Bartender school, your local rip-off for-profit “business” college. I would have to say that on those channels the ads really suck.

    The ad for Cheerios that you posted above is pretty cute, I gotta say.

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    1. I was on antenna TV until recently. Man, I loved those ambulance chaser ads! I like the ones that promise to help you if you’ve died because of someone else’s mistake!

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  6. Nice job, Steve. Another thing I notice in TV ads is the spokespersons that are being used. Some of these people are very charismatic and are fun to watch. Years ago I remember one that I think did Menards commercials. That guy stopped doing the ads for some reason that I can’t remember and they tried another person. The replacement was not as good as the other guy and they didn’t continue to use him.

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  7. I love the commercials on Jacques station for AARP flavored clients with special bath needs and bad hearing cheap phone with auto 911 dial features for when the inevitable fall happens. Geriatric profiling, all the pill ads drive me nuts the tv show ads tell me more than I want to know about what the world is watching I am a turner classic movie guy no ads just moviies , I watch the am news and get frustrated when the same 4 stories get repeated again and again
    Tv is the brain sucking monster of our times. Maybe second only to the imternet

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    2. I often have TV on when I’m doing other things, particularly in my studio. Background noise. And, as I mentioned here before, I tend to gravitate to things I’ve seen before. This means that I hit the Hallmark Channel quite a bit on weekends; this past Sunday I worked in my studio for several hours with the “Jane Doe” series going most of the day. This means you see the geriatric profiling in a big way. I ended up keeping the remote close at hand because you can’t keep listening to Debbie Boone talking about Lifestyle Lift and Pat Boone talking about tubs.

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  8. I hardly ever watch TV, so I don’t see too many commercials. The geriatric and viagra/cialis ads are pretty annoying. Good for General Mills. The uproar doesn’t surprise me. On our vacation, our East Indian daughter-in-law was surprised that she wasn’t singled out for special airport security pat downs like she usually is. We assume it is because she is brown. The last time they flew she was stopped and searched because she had bobby pins in her hair..

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  9. Mostly I watch PBS these days (and mostly the kids shows with Darling Daughter, at that) – so we only get the “sponsorship announcements,” not real commercials. When I do see commercials, it’s generally something that has been passed along from YouTube via Facebook – that’s how I saw the cute Cheerios commercial Steve noted (and I really hope there is a day soon that this is “normal” for everyone – heaven knows it is for most folks). I was lead to this one from FB as well. It will please the geeks and nerds in the crowd, I think:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPkByAkAdZs

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  11. Steve – wonderful commentary. I had seen the Cheerios commercial a couple of times before the firestorm ignited – I didn’t even notice the bi-racial couple. And until you mentioned it, I hadn’t noticed that the couple in the insurance commercial were bi-racial either. I’ve seen that ad many times – like most commercials, it’s a bit annoying.

    So I guess I have to answer today’s question with “I haven’t noticed”. I’m pretty good at tuning out commercials, especially when I have the remote close by!

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    1. That’s my response, too. I look at the screen rather infrequently when I watch TV, and I never watch the commercials. I only hear the voices, or if it’s a commercial that just has a music track with no voices, I have no idea what the ad was for.

      I have a remote with a mute button, but unless it’s political ad season, I don’t use it. If you mute the commercial, then you have to watch the screen to know when the program is back on.

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      2. This is the joy of watching lots of things you’ve seen before. If you don’t get the sound turned back on right away, it’s doesn’t matter! Really, as I type about TV it makes me wonder why I bother…..

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  12. Here’s a good example of me and ads. The ad below I have seen many times but I think I have muted it every single time, because I can’t tell you anything that they’re talking about in the ad or why the one guy wants to hit the other guy with a bat. I just know from the actors that it’s a Dish Network ad; all previous Dish Network/Hopper ads w/ these characters have been annoying, so now I just mute them all the minute I notice them!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHWmqwQcg0U

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    1. That repulsive commercial implies that people will resort to extreme violence to see their favorite shows.In the same series is an ad that shows the grampa character sitting on the toilet. Not my favorite!

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  13. We’ve had our “real TV” for a few months now, and I still only watch CBS Sunday morning and an occasional something on PBS. Well, I decided to try out “Under the Dome” Monday night, and I lasted exactly 40 minutes, in part because of the violence I saw coming (that creepy guy character playing with his switchblade).

    And the commercials — several previews for other mega-violent productions — got to me. I can’t believe the number of explosions they seem to think are necessary to hold the public’s attention…

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  14. Good topic, Steve – I too “wonder how long it will be before this controversy seems odd to us all. Heard an MPR program last week about what Mississippi was like before and during the civil rights movement, and it was an eye opener. In some cases, I think the prejudice just got overlaid with acceptable behavior for survival, and is still smouldering underneath.

    I first read this story on FB; although I guess it’s not true, the comments following are interesting:
    http://www.likeyou.me/index.php/liketwo/racism-on-a-plane-story/1850/

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  16. We honestly don’t watch enough actual tv to see commercials either, but then, most of what we buy is not advertised, so it is no great loss to the advertisers. Like a lot of people here, I see ads because I read about them online.

    There is something kind of weird about that.
    Mostly, we see ads during the Olympics, maybe the Super Bowl. Some are so clever, you have no idea what they are even selling.

    I made it a conscious choice when the s&h was very small to never identify people by race or disability. When you have been thoroughly conditioned otherwise, you really have to watch yourself.

    I think it was worth it. I have never heard him identity a person by race, ethnicity or ability. On the other hand, I am not sure he fully appreciates the problems of discrimination that still exist (no matter what certain Justices may think).

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  17. I blogged last year to say that the art directors for big agencies have a fatal attraction to fly fishing, but they don’t understand it AT ALL! The current example is a Symbicort ad that runs over and over. It shows what appear to be fly fishermen fishing a stream. At least they wear stereotypical fly fishing gear.BUT . . .
    1) While their gear has a superficial resemblance to fly rods and reels, it is not. My best guess is that this is equipment for fishing live bait off big jetties. The reel isn’t really a fly reel, and it is mounted in the wrong place!
    2) They don’t have a fly line, which means of course they couldn’t flycast to save their lives.
    3) The trout they catch looks like those poor rainbows that swim in supermarket tanks until they get the death sentence. I can tell by the fins.
    4) The one cast they make is a bait fishing underhanded lob.
    5) And they are fishing live bait under a bobber for Pete’s sake! Fly fishermen hate bait fishermen!

    This commercial has stirred up a firestorm of derision from true fly anglers.

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    1. Not unlike the quilted Northern toilet paper ads years ago where the sweet little old ladies sitting around the quilt frame were all somehow knitting. Makes you wonder if they could not spare just a touch of the money in the ad budget to do the tiniest bit of research!

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    3. Generally speaking, the art directors at big agencies don’t know very much about anything. That’s because the art directors at big agencies are, in large part, under thirty. They can be effective at advertising to those segments of the population they understand- fairly affluent hipsters under thirty- but totally at sea in other areas. None of them can be bothered to do any research. They just grasp at the low-hanging cliches, cliches, ironically, they absorbed from other commercials. It’s especially amusing to see how these twenty- somethings view the elderly. The elderly, of course, are anyone over about fifty. I remember seeing a commercial featuring a couple who were easily in their mid-seventies. In the commercial, it was revealed that the couple had been married 25 years. Imagine being married 25 years! That was likely as long as the art director had been alive. He or she apparently found any duration longer than that completely incomprehensible.

      As a one-time advertising guy myself, I’m always interested in the assumptions that agency creatives make about the target market for the product they are promoting. Those assumptions are usually pretty obvious from the context of the ad and often absurdly stereotypical. It’s like they are talking to another country…

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      1. Oh, Bill, you kill me. “Imagine being married 25 years!” That is priceless. It is pretty sad that art directors don’t have enough imagination to imagine somebody married longer than 25 years. It seems that Art Directors should have more imagination than average, not less.

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  18. Just realized the cover picture for today’s blog is the old color test pattern (does digital use that or is that something from the analog days?). Very Cleaver.

    And Steve, you say the women are presented as “wise and adult”. Isn’t that just reality? (not itching for a fight, but had to give you a poke on that one)

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    1. Oh, of course! I love the one where the woman working out thanks her hubbie for banking the check, only he hasn’t done it. So he banks it while brushing his teeth, using the camera in his cell phone. What I like is the two of them assuring each other they “love you more.” He has narrowly missed disappointing her, and he makes an endearing strangled laugh as he brushes his teeth.

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  19. When I first heard about the reaction to the Cheerios ad, it made me want to go out and buy Cheerios so I could support General Mills. I think it’s wonderful that TV ads show many colors of people (even though it doesn’t make the ads any more intelligent) – families, couples, insurance agents, insurance buyers, whatever.

    It seemed to me that after President Obama’s was first elected, I started seeing more ads with black people. Considering that there were many states where interracial marriage was illegal when I was young, not to mention the atrocities that could be visited on black males if they merely looked at a white females, we’ve come a long way. But we still have a Long Way to Go until Martin Luther King Jr’s dream comes true.

    This ad is from a long time ago, but it’s still one of my favorites. Good thing none of these guys was thinking of a music career.

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  20. On our vacation I saw a horrible, culturally insensitive commercial for ribs featuring stereotypic “hillbillies”. I think it is a US company. Anyone else see it?

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  21. I am very interested in subliminals in advertising. (I’m interested in psychology as a whole, but this topic is particularly interesting to me.) In one of the books I bought, I read that just as Congress was going to enact actual legislation against subliminals, the advertising industry conviced them that they would police themselves. So, according to the book I read, there are actually no laws regulating subliminal images/messages. Some people say that it’s all hooey…and I have to admit that there are some examples that are pretty far-fetched. But others are pretty darn obvious. Do they work? Like most things, it depends on the individual. For some, it’s very effective, not so much so for others. But, if you’re in advertising, any possible edge you can give yourself is probably worth it.
    Here are some examples…
    http://www.artistmike.com/Temp/SubliminalAd.html

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