Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Mountain Dew Gets Racist and makes Light of Battered Women all in the Same Ad!

I think this might be the low point in recent advertising history. The ad starts with a lineup of all black men dressed in thug garb with a goat wearing a suit and a bow-tie.

The one-minute ad (the link is gone in most places but you can still see it by clicking here) shows a badly beaten blonde Caucasian woman approaching the line-up on crutches. A white male warden says, "We got 'em all lined up, nail the little sucker." The goat, in a raspy male voice bullies her with phrases, "keep your mouth shut, I'm going to do ya when I get out," "ya better not snitch on a playa'," and "snitches, get stitches, fool." The woman becomes hysterical and runs from the room. As the ad ends, you can hear her screaming off-screen.

Wow, "I'm going to get ya when I get out?" That is some low stuff and shows that Mountain Dew is just scraping the bottom of the barrel to sell their product. You would think that these ad-men would vet this stuff before releasing it. Maybe sit down a focus group and say "is a police lineup featuring only black thug types and a goat menacing a battered woman a good way to sell our high-caffine soda?" Or did they ask "what about Mountain Dew makes you think of battered women and racist stereotypes?" Someone needs to be fired over this mess.

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