Tuesday, November 08, 2022

My Hope For The Election

 ... is that the red wave is big enough to make corporate marketing teams rethink their woke biases and begin to sell to Normals again.

I'm a big believer in advertising as both a marker of the culture and a driver of the culture. When I watch sports, which is almost all I watch, there are no cultural biases in the event itself. It's the ads which contain all the evangelization. These days, it's common to see ads that push a political or cultural agenda instead of pushing their product. I'd love it if those ads went away. I don't want Proctor and Gamble selling me on LGBT weddings.

There are plenty of red flags out there for the marketing teams to observe. Ron DeSantis won his battle with Disney. Netflix did very poorly with their slate of woke shows. Elon Musk's Twitter hasn't been harmed by his takeover and, in fact, is registering all-time traffic highs. 

The progressive zealots selling trandgenderism and racial obsessions are a thin veneer on society. A massive red tsunami would make that crystal clear to the dudes and dudettes what sign the checks at the big firms.

I don't harbor any illusions about particularly good governance. I just want a cultural shift.

Image source.

2 comments:

tim eisele said...

I am curious: what sorts of things are actually being advertised during sporting events? How many of them are products that you would buy? Are you even their target audience? Or, are a lot of them products that you personally would never buy in a million years no matter how they are advertised? And in that case, is their only use for you to annoy you enough to complain about them online, and maybe bring them to the attention of people who might buy them just to spite you?

(I don't watch sports, and very little ad-supported TV in general, so I'm not actually sure what is being advertised on TV these days)

K T Cat said...

Everything from the Army to cars are advertised with a clearly woke angle. The women are always in charge. There's usually an LGBT couple. The demographics are skewed wildly towards blacks. I'd love to make my own ads where the cast is straight from the Botswanan comedy, Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. In the ad, the actors would tell you just why they're in the ad - because it is the blackest ad of them all! It would be hilarious.

When I talk about it with my friends, regardless of political persuasion, they've all noticed the same thing. Because the roles are so clearly meant to be shoved down your throat, our emotional reactions are negative. The ads are horrible for that reason. They're selling representation, not their products.

The problem isn't that women are in charge or the family in the ad is black, it's that every single ad has the same casting. By the time you've seen the tenth one in a row, it's a massive turn-off.

Sometimes I think that every ad agency is using the same algorithm and that's why they all end up with the same not-so-hidden messages.