Ad

I'd like to share an ad I saw on the train the other day.
This is for emobile, a cellphone company here. I believe this is part of a larger ad campaign which features a macaque monkey in a suit as Barack Obama. Oh yes.

But what I want to talk about is this ad, targeting the average Japanese consumer, whom (right?) I'm gonna choose to call Gus. Gus knows and cares nothing about politics or advertising campaigns, but riding the train to work one day he sees this poster:


(Sorry for the poor quality, you're not supposed to take pictures on the train so I had a very limited opportunity for this.)

"Wow!" thinks Gus, "look at all the pretty people! They've got great teeth!"
Gus checks his breath, then gets some gum from his briefcase.
"They all look really excited about this phone company, maybe I should get one too?"
Gus takes a closer look.
"There's a bunch of pretty Japanese people, and a pretty girl in the front there who's maybe Indian or something, and way in the back there there's a young foreign guy in an orange shirt, is he Dutch maybe? and there on the left..."




"OMG! An old, fat, hairy white guy!! Where do I sign??"

Sure, the blonde woman next to him has way too many teeth, but that happens in ads all the time. What I don't get is how the ofhwg is gonna cell phones. Sex appeal? Is he the wacky neighbor? Michael Moore? Somebody paid a lot of money for this, which means someone else was sure it would appeal to the general public. I don't think they just grabbed the first caucasians they saw off the street.

I get the monkey-as-Obama thing: Obama is wildly popular here, monkeys are cute, and the overtly racist implications are almost certainly unintentional (ask me sometime about Little Black Sambo tableware).

Tangentially, who are we voting for?