I have been seeing a weird commercial a lot lately for the fast food restaurant chain, Jack In the Box. I hadn’t had much experience with this chain before coming out to the West Coast, but I have to report that their food is in general pretty heinous. Which would explain possibly why they need to resort to bizarre commercials to drive their product home. In this most recent commercial, we see the Jack in the Box spokesthing talking to a guy about the new burgers that have some shitty barbecue sauce in them. On the weird plastic head of the spokesthing is some BBQ sauce, and the other guy is trying to indicate that he has smeared it on himself. I tried finding a video of it to reproduce here, but couldn’t find one. Anyway, the guy sort of makes this gesture of trying to lick the side of his mouth, to get the spokesthing to catch on, but eventually just reaches over and wipes it off of the spokesthing’s plastic head.
Immediately after that, the guy tells the spokesthing that his fly is unzipped, and reaches towards the spokesthing’s crotch to fix it. But the spokesthing backs off and says something like “I can handle that.” It ends up being this weird moment of gay innuendo/homophobia that is unresolved and - as near as I can tell - has nothing to do with eating or selling hamburgers. So what the hell is going on here? What exactly are they trying to do?
Looking around for more info on this last night, I started finding other ads online which make use of similar themes to sell seemingly unrelated products. Check out this, which seems to be an ad for ice cream disguised as a low-budget viral “home movie” about college guys on spring break:
The crux of the “joke” seems to be that some horned up guys are going to bother girls sunbathing on the beach, only to discover that one of the “chicks” is actually a dude. Hilarity ensues - or rather, some cheap facsimile of it. The commercial ends with an admonition to “TREAT YOURSELF TO SOMETHING REAL.” Mmmm, kind of makes you want to buy ice cream… and hamburgers, right?
Looking around some more, I found a website called “Commercial Closet” which apparently is all about homosexual sensitivity in advertising. They review and rate commercials and offer a set of “best practices” for marketers to adhere to in order to not offend the increasingly large gay population of consumers in America. Not surprisingly perhaps, they also have a page which reviews a different Jack in the Box advertisement and also finds it severly lacking in its portrayal of homosexuality. In their rating, they explain:
Ads in this section may be funny to some, but they often use fear of same-sex attraction (homophobia) or “inappropriate” gender behavior (transphobia) — accompanied by a horrific reaction by someone straight — as their source of humor. Many ads that would already be funny purposely choose a “gay punchline” to heighten the joke. Gay or transgendered people are also shown here as queens, predators, pornographers, murderers, pedophiles and greeted with fear, shock, repulsion and occasional violence. Bisexuals are shown as cheaters, and transgender persons are often shown with the time-worn cliché of “Surprise — she’s a he!” These ads do not meet Commercial Closet’s Best Practices.
It’s a really interesting site, worth checking out in more detail, I think. Also, while you’re at it, I found some other Jack in the Box commercials to look at on YouTube, along with some commentary on another site about an ad of theirs which seems to be marketed exclusively to stoners and seems to be encouraging them to drive under the influence.
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Rep. Ed Shrock’s Gay Sex Tapes
- Just can’t get enough
- Gay Penguins to Go Straight at German Zoo
- Queer as stock
- “We don’t mean to offend you, but gay sex is a sin, and you’re all going to burn in hell forever.”
11 Comments
This is kind of a metacomment, but I thought I’d point out the interesting juxtaposition I experienced reading Connect the Dots Marketing and then scrolling down to read this post. By putting out a weird commercial they managed to get you to introduce their brand (albeit negatively) and even link to a place where your readers can view more of their commercials. That’s some viral shit!
By the way, did you happen to pick up the word “spokesthing” from Mr. Show? It’s used in this sketch, which is probably pretty relevant to what you’re talking about:
I’m also reminded of a Saturday Night Live sketch where an ad agency or somesuch is presenting a commercial they’ve produced that consists almost entirely of Molly Shannon and Tim Meadows tongue-kissing (jarring for the interracial thing; also, as I recall, hot). Can’t find that one online, though.
Hardees has a recent commercial featuring a soldier talking about how his girlfriend made him quit smoking. It wraps up with some sort of admission about how he likes to go to Hardees to get his sausage smoked. Gay innuendo or just plain stupid? Probably both.
Also, on the topic of viral videos, CBS news had a story on tonight about how viral marketing is the “new” thing.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/04/eveningnews/main1867904.shtml
Here is my pet theory - only about a 10% of the population is truly straight (heterosexual) and marketing geniuses know this. They are trying to figure out or already know how to exploit this.
The exploitation falls into two categories. First, like this ice cream commercial, there is the straightforward approach titilation with a hot “unisex” ass in a pink bikini bottom. The other style is to cater to the guilt/loathing aspect of homosexual desires.
Commercials are one of the worst aspects of our consumer culture. They are invasive, rude and wildly underhanded. Tivo is a fantastic invention.
Put this in the gobsmacking territory if you will. But downtown portland tonight was utterly, surreally out of its collective mind tonight. Just when I didn’t think it couldn’t get any weirder, a cop car rolled past a group of girls out on a bachelorette party and the cop yelled out at them that they “needed to drink more”.
I’ve become really bored that a lot of popular humor relies on the non sequitur. Particularly commercials, flash videos, viral web humor, etc. … I’m not against the non sequitur, believe me, but the point of the non sequitur is to come from left field and surprise you. On occasion, it’s really funny. When it happens all the time, it’s not funny anymore. When every commercial uses it, it turns commercials into reflections of the marketing geniuses that managed to graduate a few terms ago and now have been able to snag jobs with top marketing agencies. Hmm.
The gay thing is overdone. Period. But I guess you can say that it’s good that it’s out there in the open… that pop culture is “getting it out of its system.” Hopefully it’s a step in the right direction that all of this cultural honesty (a lot of which is through caricature) is on the table. A novelty like Blaxploitation until eventually it naturally tones itself down to normality. The homophobia thing is pretty honest too, and I think putting it out on the table makes people think about it. I’ll be happy when there are less queeny gays represented as the gay-norm though. Whew.
Yeah, the irony (hypocrisy?) is not lost on me. The only way it seems to disentangle yourself from it is to go cold turkey on all of it. Drop pop culture like a bad habit. I recognize that I’m not able to do that because I’m as much a part of the system as anybody. I have a product just like anybody else… I used to get kind of stressed out and guilty about that, but not so much anymore.
It would only be hypocrisy if you had claimed to be immune to Connect the Dots Marketing and if the Jack in the Box commercials in this post were actually an example thereof, which they aren’t really. The whole “inducing controversy or discomfort to spur discussion” advertising strategy is kind of a different thing, or a different means to the same end.
I agree, marketing is definitely an aspect of pop culture (maybe the most important aspect, or at least the most pervasive and commonly experienced), and to discuss and explore it on this blog is right and necessary, even if doing so “plays into the advertisers’ hands.” You can’t really talk about anything these days without indirectly selling something. It’s like Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Except it’s Advertising speaking, instead of Jesus.
There, I just sold a Bible.
“totally fucking gay.”
now, in the midwest, where i’m from, that would mean, “totally fucking lame/stupid.”
however, out here people get highly offended if i say that. i’m not homophobic in the least, but why the hell should i be expected to change my voculabulary to appease some stupid subculture, who just happened to arbitrarily appropriate the term for their own use anyway?
Wait, but didn’t YOUR subculture also just abitrarily appropriate that term? Not to say I haven’t used the term myself in that sense either - it’s a lot more acceptable to say that type of shit on the east coast than here on the Left Coast
I’ve spent a lot of time deconstructing advertising. One thing I discovered a long time ago, which may be obvious to some of us, is that the less you need something, the bigger the ad budget has to be. Makeup? Cars? Useless appliances?
Marketing is a dark, dark science. The fact that I see more and more car ads appealing to a non-existent “freedom” is really funny to me. I am constantly reminded of a quote from the Principia Discordia….
“Ye lock yerself up in these cages, yet ye complain ye lack freedom…”