An immediate outcry yesterday about the “homophobic ad” above has promoted Snickers to pull the whole campaign. You can’t find any trace of it on the website that was promoted at the end of the spot – it just redirects you to the Snickers site. A website called Americablog.com breaks down the whole campaign and explains why it “promotes violence against gays and lesbians.” A pretty compelling argument from those guys — but not so fast — a column from Outsports.com asserts that everyone is just overreacting.
All of the endings point to a rather sophisticated message. The two men in the “Love Boat” ending don’t protest or even react to the third man’s solicitation. And in the other three endings, the two men try to do something “manly” to make up for their kiss. Instead, they end up doing things – drinking motor oil and hitting each other with metal objects – that are just harmful and stupid, or they do something – ripping off chest hair – that could be considered “gay.”The sophisticated message seemed to be that the overreaction of “straight” men to homosexual contact is completely irrational, and, in the case of the proposed threesome, maybe that contact is not entirely shunned.
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This ad is not remotely gay-bashing. The point of the reaction of the men was so ridiculous that it made the reaction of straight men to homosexual contact the butt of the joke, not the kiss itself.
Plausible. But the problem with this argument is that it assumes any of the gay-bashing morons out there would be sophisticated enough to understand the satire of the commercial — if that was indeed the way Snickers/Mars intended it. The author is right though, Snickers got more advertising out of the controversy than they did from the $2.6M spot itself and their bottom line won’t be hurt one bit: “And if I were Mars Inc., which produces Snickers, I wouldn’t worry too much about the boycott that Aravosis is threatening: Containing a high fat content and more calories than you could burn running a 5k, Snickers bars don’t get eaten by gay men anyway.”
