Advertisers are still finding unique ways to insult us and dinegrate us to sell a product. For years my complaints were about the way that African-American women in the media were portrayed but I now realize that everyone is fair game. For example I finally figured out what they were saying in that Taco Bell commercial with the two women in the club, and the one has a bacon chalupa and I have to admit it is very disrespectful. In fact I’m not surprised feminists aren’t all over this. The message is very similar to that of the Hardee’s commercial where the girl says that she just really loves meat, you know the one where she wants a Philly Steak hamburger and the guy is like “that’s a lot of meat” and she giggles and is like “yeah, … I just like a lot of meat”.

Where are your censors when you need them? Yet that pales in comparison to the more sophisticated ads by companies such as McDonalds; for example they had this one ad that shows a Black woman working in a high-rise office doing anything and everything to sabatoge and humiliate her White male co-worker, for no particular reason whatsoever. It wasn’t clear if the message was that a Black woman will do anything over food, if food was a metaphor for something else entirely or simply to suggest that a Black woman will resort to desperate measures to get ahead in the workplace. I mean she was really letting him have it, for no apparent reason. The commercial ran for quite some time.

Of course that pales in comparison to an old Calvin Klein ad I saw in the Source years back that featured a Black male wearing all red, looking angry, and a White male on the next page, dressed in all White. Of course by that time Calvin Klein was getting desperate and trying really hard to compete with the Benetton ads, which made his stuff look lame by comparison. It could have been my imagination, but I swore I remember like red horns and a halo thrown in for extra effort.

Everyone remembers the old Pine-Sol ads with the ignorant Black housekeeper showing White people how to clean up house properly. She may as well have been the maid on The Jeffersons. But the real question is, where are the feminists, the angry White men, the civil rights leaders on all of this. We say that we’re getting along, but then our intelligence is insulted and we’re right back to those old offensive AT&T ads showing the dark continent of Africa. So what gives, are we just plain out tired or is life too hectic and moving along at too fast of a pace for us to really care.

I am a big fan of advertisements, in fact my favorite is a little known Intellivision ad where a kid who is obviously a fan of the console meets up with the spokeman of the company in a suburb which looks to be one of those suburban sprawl areas of eighties Southern California and is in awe. The interaction between the man and the kid is timeless, and that one commercial is a bigger statement of the influence of gaming, or of the power of advertising alone, than any I’ve ever seen. In fact I’d put it up there with some of the Coke ads, and we all know that they’re the undisputed champion of advertising. Coke was doing rather well until they digressed to using CGI and hired Jack White to create the most pop rock song ever but that is neither here or there.

What happened to timeless advertising; Superbowl ads suck and without the infamy of another Janet Jackson trying to answer her younger competition halftime leaves much to be desired. Stop finding creative ways to say “Screw you, you’re going to buy our stuff anyway” or insult my intelligence with Mac vs. Windows ads and give me something real. Those old ads are timeless; it’s too bad advertisers have ran out of creative ways to entertain us …