President Shill? Trump as Brand Influencer

I took a little break from blogging, and look what happens. The United States elects a man who knows nothing but self promotion, and profiting off the backs of others, to their highest office.

Trump is not yet in office, but is using his very big soap box to manipulate stock prices as a bully tactic to tell aerospace companies and automakers where to put their factories. (Although the corporations themselves say it's a coincidence.)

How is this a matter for "The Ethical Adman"? Look above. The PEOTUS is literally telling his followers to buy certain brands, as if he is a paid shill. Is this also "unpresidented"?

Welcome to the United States of America in the reality television era, where someone like Kylie Jenner can make up to $300,000 per post as a paid "brand influencer" on Instagram. Trump is part of this world — a world television viewers and social media users created — and he seems to think it's his job as future leader of the "free world" to punish and reward brands depending on whether they support him politically or not.

The most worrisome part of this phenomenon is Trump's open hostility towards certain media outlets. He used his first press conference since the election to call BuzzFeed a "failing pile of garbage" and CNN a "fake news site" from a position of ultimate power.

And that's not all:

Advertising, entertainment, politics, and the personal vendettas of a singularly unqualified president-elect: it's all one big stinking mess in 2017.

UPDATE: JC tells me that LL Bean has already stated it doesn't want Trump's endorsement.

Want to have a beer with the POTUS? This is your chance...

The image above just appeared in my G+ feed:

Is it just me, or does the picture of President Obama hanging out with frat boys look like it was photoshopped by The Onion?

The appeal links to a page on the President's site where you can pledge to "help get the word out about getting covered" and "be automatically entered for the chance to fly in to meet President Obama backstage in Washington, D.C."

I suppose it's an attempt to show President Obama as approachable, but the way he towers over the slobbish, beaming, and seemingly-drunk male youths — beer in hand — is rather bizarre.

This isn't the first time that images used in the promotion of the Affordable Care Act have left people scratching their heads. Remember the reaction to Adriana, who wasn't actually enrolled in the ACA? Remember “Pajama Boy”? Or "Out2Enroll"?

Are Bob Marley and Barack Obama products of people overcoming racism?

Via Ads of The World

This Brazilian anti-discrimination campaign caught my eye, because Bob Marley has always come up when I argue with people about the social construction of "race". Bob's father, Norval Sinclair Marley, was ethnically English. His mother, Cedella Booker, was Afro-Caribbean. Bob grew up in his mother's culture, however, and was committed to the Afrocentric Rastafarian religion. As far as Bob Marley was concerned, he was "black". But he acknowledged his background this way:

I don't have prejudice against meself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't deh pon nobody's side. Me don't deh pon the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me deh pon God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

In this way, Bob Marley is a good physical symbol of overcoming prejudice. Especially since he had to deal with racism from both of his ancestral communities.

Via Ads of The World

US President Barack Obama's background is well-known. His father was Kenyan, and his mother Anglo-American. He was raised in his mother's culture, and actually faced the preposterous question of whether he was "black enough" to represent African Americans. At the same time, his presidency is viciously vilified by white American racists who can't stand the idea of a black president.

Using a "mixed marriage" as a symbol of overcoming hate is interesting, because the present debate over marriage equality for same-sex couples frequently draws comparisons with the days of anti-miscegenation laws.

Via Twitter

In my great-grandmother's day, even marriages between Catholics and Protestants were considered "mixed". That gives you some idea of how far we've come.

But where I wish we would go is to the post-racial world, where people are identified as humans belonging to diverse cultural groups, rather than being labelled based on the external (and genetically minuscule) climate adaptations that give us the racist categories of "black", "white", etc.

One love.

Latest WTF from the NRA: Why do Obama's kids get armed guards?

I wasn't going to do any more blogging today, but WHAT IN HOLY HELL IS WRONG WITH SOME PEOPLE?!?



The Sandy Hook massacre last month ripped apart an already bipolar American gun culture. The President is responding to public demand for tighter gun control, meanwhile advocates of unrestricted civilian access to guns want to turn schools into paramilitary fortresses.

I'm on the gun-control side, but there's no point in me wading into an argument that is already using up tons of bandwidth. Instead, let's look again at just how awful that NRA ad is.

First of all, it's moronic. A couple of years ago, my son attended the same Ottawa public school as our Prime Minister's daughter. The whole time she attended in that capacity, there were armed RCMP guards discreetly positioned at the school. Of course there were. These children, through no fault of their own, are targets for a multitude of crazy, angry, and politically-motivated baddies.

But there's a deeper stench to this ad. As the Daily Beast's David Frum noted:

Generally speaking, a president's family should not be subject to political criticism. That rule was honorably upheld in the case of the Bush daughters, who grew into fine young people, and the rule should be same for the Obama daughters - especially if it's true, as has been widely reported, that this first family has faced a unique degree of threat.

This was grievous enough to warrant an official White House response by spokesman Jay Carney, “Most Americans agree that a president's children should not be used as pawns in a political fight. But to go so far as to make the safety of the president's children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly.”

The US gun "debate" is just getting uglier and uglier.

Durex China celebrates Obama with racist dick joke

"The difference between Obama and Romney is..."

Twitter is a-twitter with this Durex ad, apparently shared last night by Durex China. (Even though I can't find a Twitter feed for them.) It did, however, appear on beijingcream.com last month, where it can be tracked back to Durex China's Sina Weibo account.

"Weibo" means "microblog" and Sina Weibo is the most popular platform, with about 368 million registered users.

So the ad is apparently real. But it probably wasn't intended to be seen outside China. However, when it started being Tweeted this morning, it lost its provenance as it went viral. (I spotted it on a few friends' Facebook feeds.)

Nonetheless, can we get over obsessing about black men's penises now?

Benetton shakes up NYC with a sexy yarn bomb

Via Animal NY

Provocative marketing is nothing new to United Colors of Benetton, but how can the Italian fashion brand break through to jaded New Yorkers?

Animal NY reports that this "tastefully vulgar" sculpture by Erik Ravelo was placed in their new pop-up location in Soho.

Here's a picture with more context, from Gothamist:

An Instagrammer named samhorine posted a shot of the display, taking it viral, where user "oneoffive" made a comment after my own heart:

It certainly is a very confronting image, but I believe our children see things just as confronting on music videos. Unlike a woman grinding her butt in a guys face like on these video clips, most kids won't even realise what they are seeing when they see this display. And if they do, it's probably time to teach them a little bit about the facts of life. And yes, I have kids. @samhorine very interesting feed you have started! I'm sure this is exactly what the store owners had in mind when they put the display up, hundreds of people talking about it!

Exactly. I rail a lot about sleazy sex in advertising, but this doesn't feel like that. It's explicit, but it's a far more naturalistic portrayal of "the facts of life" that I wouldn't be upset for my 8-y-o son to see. (Since he comments on the squirrels doing it on our daily walks to school.)

Cynical shock marketing ploy? Sure. But we've all seen worse. At least this one is actually about the product it's humping.

Obamagramming for the youth vote #forall

Considering that social media played such a huge part in inspiring Americans to vote for President Obama in 2008, I was wondering what 2012 would be like. After all, the landscape has changed.

Besides Pres. Obama's stiff, third-person Twitter feed and his AMA on Reddit, I haven't seen much worth remarking on. But then I saw a piece on The Wall about the Team Obama's infiltration of Instagram.

It's a nice little movement, perfectly in tune with the sensibilities of Millennial voters. Called "a vote for all" (which contrasts nicely with Senator Romney's "47%" fiasco), it features Barrack Obama's Instagram account putting out a call to young voters:

Why are you voting for Barack Obama? Share your photo and your reason using #ForAll, then head to vote.barackobama.com. 

If there are three things that define the young generation, it's colleboration, taking pictures of themselves and their surroundings, and telling people what they're up to at all times. Since Instagram  (now owned by Facebook) allows them to do all three, it's a natural fit.

Plus, it has celebrity endorsers.

Besides Natalie Portman  and Ms. Alba, apparently Scarlett Johansson and Jared Leto have also Tweeted their support.

And it looks like it's taking off:

Will this slacktivism turn into higher youth voter turnout, considered crucial for the President's re-election? The fact that this campaign launched so late is actually a good thing, with the short memory and fickle nature of social media. But there are still a few weeks to go.

Update: Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry has already trolled the hashtag.

Man, I love social media politics.

The zippiest Zip Code song ever sung

This is, according to YouTube, a "Bonkers ending to a film about the US postal service".  I'm assuming it's this vintage promotional film?



Groovy.

Via Buzzfeed

Barbie 2012

Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Barbie is running for President of The United States of America... again.

The candidate as Euro-American.

She even has a campaign Tumblr. But what is her platform?

Okay, so she's not taking any strong stands on the GOP's War on Women's reproductive rights. But she did come up with a totally awesome nickname for her campaign ("Glam-paign"). 

Apparently, however, candidate Barbie will do something no other candidate can: she will bridge the racial divide in America by morphing herself into four different ethnicities!

The candidate as African American, Asian American and Latina(?) American.

Yes, I get that this is a toy. And the Miss-America-style platitudes are to be expected from a company that wants to sell to both sides of the political divide. But it's a shame that girls don't get a chance to see that women really can change the world.

This week, Malawi swore in Southern Africa's first female head of a country. She wasn't elected as such, but as Vice President took the position after President Bingu wa Mutharika died in office. (A scenario that could have happened with Sarah Palin, had John McCain won the Presidency.)

Other women currently heading states and countries are:

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf - President of Liberia
Doris Leuthard, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, Simonetta Sommaruga - Members of the Swiss Federal Council, Switzerland
Pratibha Patil - President of India
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner - President of Argentina
Dalia Grybauskaitė - President of Lithuania
Laura Chinchilla - President of Costa Rica
Dilma Rousseff - President of Brazil
Atifete Jahjaga - President of Kosovo
Monique Ohsan Bellepeau - Acting President of Mauritius
Slavica Đukić Dejanović - Acting President of Serbia

And:

Angela Merkel – Chancellor of Germany
Julia Gillard - PM of Australia
Yingluck Shinawatra – PM of Thailand
Helle Thorning-Schmidt – PM of Denmark
Portia Simpson-Miller – PM of Jamaica
Kamla Persad-Bissessar – PM of Trinidad and Tobago
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir – PM of Iceland (Appointed)
Hasina Wazed – PM of Bangladesh 

The United States has yet to elect a woman to the position. And while Canada has had two appointed female Vice-Regents, we have yet to elect a woman to the Prime Minister's Office. (Kim Campbell was nominated for the position directly by her party.)

So perhaps it's time for Barbie, who has been in every federal election since 1992, to campaign a little harder. Or for North American countries to catch up with the rest of the world and nominate and elect a woman of substance who isn't seen as just "another Barbie".