Ashton Kutcher learns brownface isn't acceptable, Kendall Jenner solves racism with soda, and Ted Cruz promotes family values with an adult film star. Commercials are meant to be attention grabbers — but some grab attention for all the wrong reasons.
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00:00Ashton Kutcher learns brownface isn't acceptable,
00:03Kendall Jenner solves racism with soda, and Ted Cruz promotes family values with an adult film
00:08star. Commercials are meant to be attention-grabbers, but some grab attention for all the wrong reasons.
00:14In December 2021, HBO Max launched And Just Like That, a highly anticipated revival of its
00:19Millennium-era Sex and the City. In order to get happily married main character Carrie Bradshaw
00:24single and searching once more, writers killed off her husband, Mr. Big. In the first episode,
00:29the character portrayed by Chris Noth completes his 1,000th session on a Peloton indoor exercise
00:34bike, has a heart attack, and dies on the floor of his bathroom. Rather than distance itself from
00:39the scene that cast its product in a bad light and made them seem deadly, Peloton embraced its
00:43big pop-cultural moment and within a week had produced and premiered a humorous commercial.
00:48Shall we take another ride?
00:50A few days after the commercial debuted, The Hollywood Reporter published a story
00:53based on two separate, unrelated accounts from two women accusing Noth of sexual assault.
00:58The incidents allegedly took place in 2004 and 2015. The commercial was only
01:03viewable for about four days before Peloton withdrew it from circulation.
01:08In 2022, financial services company BlackRock, Inc. produced a commercial at a real high school
01:13in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In promoting its management of pension plans for public school
01:18instructors, the commercial depicts a day in the life of Brian Delano, an advanced economics teacher
01:23at Bethel Park High School. As Delano narrates about financial health and the importance of
01:27preparing for the future, he's seen working with students, and one young man wearing a hooded
01:31sweatshirt and glasses is seen twice. That student was Thomas Matthew Crooks, who in July 2024 was
01:37identified as a gunman who was shot and killed by Secret Service agents when he attempted to
01:41assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
01:46Within two days of the violent incident, BlackRock removed the two-year-old commercial
01:49from all official distribution channels. In a released statement, the company revealed that
01:54it would make all of its video footage available to authorities, and that the video was taken out
01:58of circulation out of respect for the victims. Texas-representing U.S. Senator Ted Cruz mounted
02:03a presidential campaign in 2016, positioning himself as a very conservative candidate and
02:08aligning himself with wholesome institutions. The soft-core adult film industry probably wouldn't
02:13fit in with Cruz's stated values, so it was a legitimate problem for his campaign when it was
02:18discovered that a Vote for Cruz commercial featured Amy Lindsay, an actor who specialized in nudity-heavy
02:24erotic dramas that aired on cable television in the 1990s and 2000s. Lindsay only appeared briefly
02:29in the 32nd Cruz campaign ad, and upon learning of her past, the Cruz campaign removed the ad from
02:34use. As spokesperson Rick Tyler told BuzzFeed News,
02:38"[The actress responded to an open casting call. Unfortunately, she was not vetted by
02:42the production company. Had the campaign known of her full filmography, we obviously would not
02:46have let her appear in the ad." Holiday Inn Worldwide spent $1 billion to renovate its many
02:52motels in the late 1990s, and it announced the finished products with a 1997 Super Bowl ad.
02:57Set during a high school reunion, a reunion attendee eventually realizes that the mystery
03:01woman everyone has been checking out is actually his old friend Bob Johnson.
03:06"'It's amazing the changes you can make for a few thousand dollars.'"
03:08"'Bob? Bob Johnson? Hi, Tom.'"
03:12Aside from the issue of the motel commercial making a punchline out of gender transition,
03:16it's not even why people complained in 1997. Reverend Al Phillips,
03:20president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, proposed a boycott to the chain, saying,
03:25"'I know a lot of churches have done a lot of business with Holiday Inn through the years,
03:29including our church, and we're going to reconsider that now in light of this type
03:32of ad and the kind of values or lack of values that this ad manifests.'"
03:36Holiday Inn agreed to no longer air the commercial and proclaimed that it
03:40wasn't their intention to offend anyone.
03:42On April 4, 2017, Pepsi unveiled a commercial starring Kendall Jenner,
03:46a member of the Kardashian family, reality TV star, model, and social media influencer.
03:52However, the ad didn't simply feature Jenner simply drinking and enjoying a Pepsi.
03:56It takes place in a big-city protest of indeterminate cause. Things could take a
04:00turn to violence at any second, until Jenner emerges from the crowd and hands a can of
04:05Pepsi to a police officer, which seems to solve whatever social ill the protesters were upset
04:09about. A YouTube clip of the ad instantly went viral, and Pepsi earned so much criticism that
04:14it took down the commercial and canceled its distribution within a day of the debut.
04:18But that didn't stop Saturday Night Live from releasing a sketch about the ad.
04:22"'So the whole thing is sort of an homage to Black Lives Matter mo-'
04:25"'Don't even touch it. It'd be insane to touch it, right? Okay.'"
04:29The main argument held that the commercial liberally utilized imagery from anti-police
04:33brutality and Black Lives Matter protests, and it diminished the importance of those
04:37causes by using them for clout or to suggest that a soda could resolve such weighty issues.
04:42The beverage maker released a statement saying,
04:44"[Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity,
04:47peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark and apologize."
04:51PepsiCo hired the hip-hop and comedy collective Odd Future for a run of 2013 Mountain Dew commercials.
04:57Tyler, the creator, a member of the group, directed a few of the ads,
05:01in which he also voiced the main character, Felicia the goat, portrayed otherwise by a real animal.
05:06In one of the spots, Felicia becomes irate at a restaurant over a Mountain Dew,
05:10and she attacks a server. In another, Felicia is stopped by a police officer for
05:14do-you-I, a brand-promoting pun on DUI, and takes off running. Another ad depicts Felicia
05:19as part of a police lineup staged to catch the culprit who assaulted the server in the first
05:23commercial.
05:24"'Snitches get stitches, foo!'
05:26"'Come on, it's the one with the four legs.'
05:28"'You thought you was gonna catch me? Keep your mouth shut.'"
05:31The backlash was swift and significant. Syracuse University professor Boyce Watkins led the charge,
05:37labeling one of the spots in an essay for Your Black World as, quote,
05:40"...arguably the most racist commercial in history."
05:43PepsiCo took the offending material off of its online outlets. A Pepsi representative said in
05:48a statement to AdWeek,
05:49"...we understand how this video could be perceived by some as offensive,
05:52and we apologize to those who were offended."
05:55In 2019, Apple started producing short films that served as advertisements for its various
05:59high-tech gadgets and software programs. The films featured a group of four clever Apple
06:04workers who used their employers' products to get complicated work tasks accomplished.
06:08One particular 2024 installment found the characters in Thailand,
06:12seeking to locate and contract with a box factory that could handle a massive job.
06:16In the process, they absorbed a lot of what the creative team apparently perceived to be
06:20Thai culture, like riding in a rickshaw and spending a night in a run-down hotel.
06:24Apple distributed the ad by linking to the video on its social media accounts.
06:28It immediately started to field criticism that the ad was woefully out of date,
06:32and its cliché-filled depiction of Thailand as a rural and antiquated country.
06:37The company that makes pop chips attempted a viral marketing campaign in 2012 with a series
06:42of advertisements in which Ashton Kutcher monologues as different snack-munching guys
06:46in faux dating profile videos. Among Kutcher's characters — Daryl the fashionista, Swordfish
06:52the hard-partying southern man, Nigel the British marijuana enthusiast, and Raj, a producer of
06:57movies in the Indian Bollywood scene. To portray Raj, Kutcher wore extensive skin-darkening makeup,
07:02donned traditional Indian clothing, and spoke in an intended-to-be-comical approximation of
07:06an Indian accent. The ads indeed went viral, but not for the reasons that the people at
07:11Pop Chips had hoped. Many people found the spot to be more than a little racist,
07:16with tech writer Anil Dash writing,
07:18If you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad,
07:22funny accent in order to sell potato chips, you're on the wrong course."
07:26In response, Pop Chips took down all of the Kutcher videos from YouTube before restoring them,
07:31except the one about Raj.
07:33The broadcast of Super Bowl XLII in February 2008 included multiple commercials for and
07:38produced internally by SalesGenie.com, an Omaha-based retail business consulting agency.
07:44All of the ads were minimally animated, and one revolved around a pair of talking pandas
07:48who utilized SalesGenie's services. Because real giant pandas traditionally come from China,
07:53SalesGenie's umbrella company's lead executive and its commercial scriptwriter Vinod Gupta
07:58made his cartoon pandas come from that place, too. They did, however,
08:01speak grammatically incorrect English and with a thick, broad, stereotypical Asian accent.
08:07After receiving a high number of complaints over the perceived racist undertones of the ad,
08:11Gupta announced that his company, InfoUSA, would take it off the air, telling the New York Times,
08:16We never thought anyone would be offended. If I offended anybody, believe me, I apologize.
08:22The American automotive manufacturing industry makes extensive use of robots,
08:26and a fictional one took the spotlight in a 2007 Super Bowl commercial for General Motors,
08:30touting a newly instituted extended warranty program.
08:34After it messes up its assembly line job, the robot gets fired, and it's so upset over losing
08:38its GM employee status that it plunges to its death after leaping from a bridge.
08:43The GM 100,000-mile warranty. It's got everyone at GM obsessed with quality.
08:54The ad prompted the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to publicly criticize the
08:58commercial as being hostile to those whose lives were touched by suicide.
09:02GM quickly removed the original version of the spot from the airwaves and its internet channels,
09:06and promised to run an edited version that didn't include a robot's suicide.