International confusion

[seeingred]

The mainstream press here have picked up on the online kerfuffle over KFC's cricket ad, which they've now withdrawn from TV. It must have boggled American minds: what critics see is a white guy, nervous to be surrounded by black people, placating them with fried chicken

Comments

[purrdence]

My first thought is that the ad people for chicken fast food places are now in a no-win situation. If they include dark skinned people in their ads, they'll get slammed because of the 'African American-Fried Chicken' stereotype. But if they don't include dark skinned people, they'll get accused of not being inclusive...

[seeingred]

I'm actually quite curious to find out how KFC markets itself to African-Americans. With great care, I should imagine!

[purrdence]

My second thought was, can we get America to get rid of that stupid 'Simpsons go to Australia' episode in return?

[seeingred]

The US has some pretty strange ideas about Australia, many of which are on display at Outback Steakhouse. :) None of them rival the power of Jim Crow, though.

[purrdence]

Wikipedia reckons that fried chicken became popular with Southern African-Americans because a)chicken was cheap and b)fried chicken kept longer in pre-fridge days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_chicken#History

[hnpcc]

I'm troubled by that, and by the idea that ad-makers the world over ought to check that their work doesn't offend Americans.

I started wondering about this after the outcry over the Japanese phone company ad during the 2008 presidential election campaign. On the one hand, I understood what the protesters were reacting to - on the other why would those necessarily be the same symbols to the Japanese? On the third, invisible hand I still don't know enough to know whether they are the same, although given that the phone company executives mentioned that their mascot was a monkey because it was a good luck symbol possibly not.

[purrdence]

What was the ad about?

Also, the monkey is one of the 12 Zodiac in Japanese culture.

[hnpcc]

Link to ad and discussions here:

http://www.wikio.com/video/290482

Short version: a monkey dressed in a suit making a presidential-like campaign speech about mobile phones while crowds cheer and hold signs saying "Change!" in both English and (I presume it's the same word) Japanese.

Again, I can see why Americans got offended and what they were seeing, but I'm still not sure whether the monkey=black person stereotype is present in Japan, or whether they just took their company mascot and the zeitgeist of the time in a similar way that the Jeep ads did and made a seriously unfortunate (from an American perspective at least) gaffe.

[purrdence]

Oh.. E-Mobile. I remember seeing these types of ads in Japan.

Unless I've missed something, the monkey=black person stereotype does not exist Japan. It's more like black person=woohoo! really exotic gaijin! stereotype Which, when you think about it, is similar to how some black men are seen in some western societies.

Most of the other signs are the E-Mobile logo or something about E-Mobile in Japanese.

[purrdence]

http://contexts.org/socimages/2010/01/07/are-they-racist-or-are-we-ethnocentric/

[kateorman]

Thanks for the link - that's a great posting, and a great discussion, looking at the matter from many angles.

Because I so seldom watch TV, I had no idea that the nervous white guy was a recurring character in KFC ads, until I spotted him on the side of a bus this morning! That's another piece of context that would be absent for Americans viewing the ad on YouTube.

[seeingred]

Yeah, I think so. Police officers blacked up at a party to mock Aboriginal men who had died in custody in 1992, Sam Newman blacked up on the Footy Show in 1999. In both cases there was huge media coverage, outrage, debate, etc. If the average Australian didn't understand the meaning of blackface before those incidents, they certainly did afterwards!