Kirstie Stofanik
April 27th, 2009
In London, on March, 24th, A Russian Company was criticized for creating a racist ice-cream commercial. In the advertisement for a chocolate and vanilla bar it features Barack Obama standing in front of the white house with the caption, Everybody’s talking about it- Dark in White. The advertisement seemed to cause a big uproar causing many to post blogs and other things online criticizing the “tasteless ad”. Alexander Verkhovsky of anti-racism group Sova, stated; “Violations of political correctness in Russia are clearly acceptable and adverts like this just reinforce ethnic divisions. “The fact this is a mainstream advert is potentially dangerous - the image is not aggressive in itself - but it can foment prejudice in a more insidious way,” he added. The company which is in charge of this controversial commercial fought back saying that they see nothing wrong with what was said and that pointing out race is not racism.
I would say that I agree with the company when they say that they were not being racist. I feel that they didn’t do anything wrong but they should have thought of a different idea for their commercial so that there could be no feelings hurt or any way that people could take things the way they were not intended. The company may have lost buyers simply because they tried to use a controversial commercial. Using things like race in a commercial can often cause ethnic division problems and this is a big issue that needs to be left out of commercials.
3 comments:
I also think it is always a great risk using controversial advertisement. I guess this company wanted to provoke people which leads to the fact that one can remember the name of this ice cream-whoch is obviously their goal.
In my opinion it is too much, I think there should not be such an advertisement as not everyone can understand it.
What were they thinking! Of course this happened. I think it's a clever idea for sure, but man, that's risky. Now they're paying the price.
Since I'm black and white and an advocate for putting an end to racism I obviously think this ad was tasteless. Ice cream is already such a delicious treat, you don't need controversial ads to sell it.
Post a Comment