The Promise of Ass Rapings by Scary Black Men Used to Promote Sober Driving.
(click ads) Campaign, via South African alcohol company Brandhouse, is for some initiative called Drive Dry (Firefox and Safari both say the website in the ad is suspicious.) There are white men in the campaign, but only in less scary "They" group shots; these two ads are the lead executions. Ad agency: FoxP2, Capetown.
Previously in South Africa:
• Ricky Martin's coming out exploited.
• Apartheid humor used to sell bronzer.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. exploited to sell VWs.
posted by copyranter @ 10:10 AM
9 Comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JWUXXXJq8k&feature=player_embedded
Much better, but irrelevant. The Print ads have to stand on their own.
I read sadness, pity, "don't land up like him", not scary threatening black man. Projection, much?
The campaign is titled (via the agency press notes) "Dating." Wrong, much?
Couple of points -
Didn't it occur to you that the ads might just reflect the ethnic makeup of the South African populace ?
Two, there is a white guy in one of the lead ads.
Admittedly, this is creepy:
>The campaign is titled (via the agency press notes) "Dating."<
Tasteless ? Absolutely.
Racist ? Questionable.
@copyranter: point taken about the campaign title, it makes the ad far less intelligent.
But _black_ men? The lead with only one man in it says "coloured man" not "black" to me ("coloured" is not an offensive term in SA, and understood as different to black.) Don't know why, I may be seeing wrong again; but we SAfricans are schizophrenic in that way, holding on to categories while trying to erase them in what we see. Point is, a South African reaction to signs of race and criminality is not as clear-cut as you may think.
I almost choked on my boerewors when I saw the tv ad. Apart from the cynical attempt to defend the very industry that is the root cause of so many problems (i.e. carry on drinking until you wake up in your own vomit, but take a taxi) there was something disturbing about the progression from deranged (almost kooky) white guy, to beefy black dude, to 'coloured' guy with prison tattoos. I'm sure the very precise escalation in scariness was an unconscious expression of racism, but that may be even worse.
Thanks for that. I actually didn't watch the spot all the way to the end.
You know there are a lot of men who wouldn't consider this a threat, but a temptation.
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