In an era where DVRs and Netflix exist, it is harder than ever for advertisers to come up with ways to grab the attention of consumers and successfully promote a product. No matter how well an ad is packaged or filmed, the overabundance of advertisement media has caused consumers to become desensitized to it. Good advertisements must overcome this hurdle. One might suggest advertisers market in more creative ways. For instance, Gucci painted murals on city buildings in New York City. However, most advertisers run on a budget—they are greedy enough to attempt to create the biggest impact with the lowest possible expense. This thought process can lead to controversial advertisements that may generate more buzz around a product than more benign ads.
This is exactly what happened about a week ago with Heineken, as the company featured an ad with a racially offensive undertone. The now-removed ad features a bartender sliding a bottle of Heineken past two black women and a black man, only for the bottle to end up right beside a white woman as the slogan “sometimes, lighter is better” appears on the screen. The ad has been criticized for glorifying whiteness and portraying blackness in a demeaning way; the black people featured in the ad can look at, but not enjoy, a bottle of Heineken, a symbol of leisure. The ad has been discussed on several news outlets for its racial undertone, as well as by celebrities such as Chance the Rapper. With many people talking about the ad, and immediately recognizing its fault, one can’t help but think: how did the people who made it did not recognize the racist undertones of the ad?
One possible answer is that the company did recognize it—in fact it intended for the ad to be racist— because it knew that controversy would help promote Heineken even further. People would be shocked enough to look into the ad and therefore become more aware of Heineken’s products. We are living in an age where a piece of information does not stay fresh for a long time, as there is a constant influx of new information every second. This means that anything—despite how racist, controversial, or weird it may appear—will be forgotten too soon to have a negative long-term effect on the person or organization who shared it. It has barely been a year, and Kendall Jenner’s tone-deaf Pepsi ad—which trivialized protest by implying that tensions between demonstrators and police could be assuaged with a can of soda—has been forgotten.
It is hard to find an example in which the negative effect from an advertisement has attached itself to the reputation of a company in the long term. Corporations do try to remedy the situation with short-term solutions. They take action by firing an executive or director responsible for greenlighting the ad, but that is usually the corporation putting the blame on one specific person and trying to resolve the situation without causing too much trouble, as multiple people approve the ads. Usually, the advertisement is reviewed by the advertising team that created it, the executive who is overseeing the production process, and the executive board that owns the product. ‘The phrase, “any publicity is good publicity” has been carried to its logical extreme when something as blatantly racist as this Heineken ad is broadcast. The fact that Heineken chose to broadcast it would be forgotten in a matter of days. With nothing to lose, Heineken would rather publish the ad to get some brand recognition than not publish it and possibly lose sales. It is impossible to say that it takes the same amount of time for the negative effects of any ad to be forgotten, however, based on previous scandals, it is certainly not that long.
This Heineken ad is far from the only instance of obvious racism within the advertising industry. Whether it is the black child sporting a hoodie that reads “Coolest Monkey In The Jungle” for H&M’s ad campaign or a Nivea ad stating “white is purity,” the advertising industry seems focused on creating ads that create controversy large enough to draw attention, but not too large that it will permanently damage the brand.
There are possible long-term effects of advertisements like this from which the masses are turning away. The lack of protest and the lack of punishment surrounding these ads imply that it’s okay to create them. One might say that children of younger generations, kids who consume hundreds of hours of online content including ads, will be negatively affected by these ads and unconsciously internalize their racism. Publishing these ads acts as a catalyst for such possibilities, where the whole world questions whether racism is okay or not, because a global conglomerate allowed for something like this to be published. One might even say that if an enterprise, maybe one that kids like, produces and publishes such an ad, they will support it despite the controversy because they are loyal to that brand.
The developments and innovations within the digital world of the 21st Century have certainly altered how the human mind works, as we have become accustomed to seeing advertisements and therefore more capable of ignoring them, searching instead for the type of content we demand. But the development of this mental filter has put advertisers in a tough spot, as their hard work is easily put aside by the consumer. It seems that in their desperate times, some advertisers have embarked on an all-or-nothing mission, where they risk their careers by creating an ad that would stir up debate, having people question international brands and their ethics.
Even if advertisers are in a tough spot, they should not bypass morals and ethical values. Just like professionals in every other industry, advertisers have to improvise, adapt, and overcome challenges. They should make their advertisements more interactive, thoughtful, or visually pleasing. It is this new extreme that causes people to question the limits of advertising, the lengths at which greed will cause people to forego their moral ethics and how the decrease in attention span alters our societal tendencies. In the midst of all the controversy and all the chaos, one cannot help but think: it is time for the saying “any publicity is good publicity” to become obsolete. •
