Subverting ads
I’m a sucker for ads that comment on the dishonesty of ads. For example, I laughed at this one from Newcastle Brown Ale:
I also really liked this one as well:
I do have a duck-rabbit disagreement with Piper Hoffman’s reading of it at BlogHer. I took the ad as a direct comment on the sexism of beer ads: if you’re not an attractive woman, beer companies won’t include you. But Piper raises an interesting point. [SPOILER ALERT] She’s right that if the pronoun had been “she,” the point would have been less ambiguous. But it also would have been a bit crueler, since the ad would have had Newcastle calling their brewmistress unattractive, and it also could have been taken as Newcastle agreeing that only attractive women should ever be shown on in an ad.
While I enjoy a meta-ad like this (at least as I take it), I also feel a bit meta-fooled: What does that have to do with whether their beer is any good? I’m not looking to be friends with a beer.
I get more enjoyment from viewers subverting ads. For example, I saw an ad for KFC about some new boneless chicken product.
I wasn’t paying attention, in part because it was a commercial, and in part because I haven’t eaten anything from KFC since I became a vegetarian 1979 but I have not forgotten the sensation of eating chicken that’s been so close to liquefied that it’s held together only by a layer of deep-fried cholesterol. But I saw the hashtag #iAteTheBones and checked it out on Twitter.
Bunches of the tweets praise the commercial as amusing. (It was directed by David O.Russell, who also directed the Oscar-winning Silver Linings Playbook.) But prominent in the list is this:
THE MAJORITY OF INSTAGRAM POSTS BEARING KFC’S #IATETHEBONES HASHTAG FEATURE DIRT TUNNELS LITTERED WITH SHREDDED CLOTHING.
— Daniel Manitou (@ActualPerson084) April 20, 2013
Well, not as far as I can tell. But the tweet made me look.
And a heavily-favorited tweet is quite savage:
.@kfc_colonel Is it normal to fill a toilet with blood? #IAteTheBones
— Jocelyn Plums (@FilthyRichmond) April 16, 2013
Someone in the KFC Marketing Department has already written an email to senior management explaining why this is a good thing for KFC. But, um, it’s not.
Neither is this:
