Customers Like Me - Verizon uses race to make you look. By Seth�Stevenson
(things sorta got mixed up with blogger earlier...)
when i first saw these spots i noticed the little kid's kinky hair and thought, is he brown? with a white grandpa? i thought i was hallucinating.
since i come from a biracial family i guess it shouldn't be a big deal to see one in a commercial, but it is. you don't realize how overwhelmingly white pop culture is unless you're not white. and seeing mixed couples or families anywhere? forget it. over the past 20 years i can think of an ikea commercial, a car commercial, a heineken ad and one old tide spot that showed a mixed couple. so seeing a middle class family that looks like my own (or at least my sister's) makes me sit up and think about switching to verizon.
whenever things like this come up, the reaction is usually scoffing. what do we brown people want? commercials for everyone? a spot with indians, mexicans, koreans, africans?
well, yeah.
so here's a shout out to verizon's canny marketing ploy and exploitation of multiculti reality - it works for me
No comments:
Post a Comment