On hearing about this, I made the mistake of first viewing a response video from one of those offended, a so-called comedian, and actor named Hassan Minhaj. After viewing it I was kind of taken aback not to mention confused since the clip of the advert included is so obscure that I couldn't see the relation to PopChips. I then viewed the original advert in full and began to understand it a bit more, but peoples reaction to it less. Check out the original advert here:
Ashton Kutcher portrays a variety of characters who are recording dating personal ads/videos. The thing to remember here, that other people seem to have skipped over in their rush to express their 'genuine' outrage and concern, is that all the characters are clearly stereotypes and are supposed to be undesirables that you wouldn't ever want to date. This is reinforced later when a seemingly normal Ashton Kutcher insults them all.
The source of the outcry is that one of the characters is an Indian man named Raj and Kutcher is made up to make his appearance fit this role (his skin is browned). Because of this and the accent he puts on, the advert has been called racist. Thoughtless? Yes. Racist? Perhaps, let's look into it a little deeper. (Here's the response from the aforementioned comedian just for comparrison):
So the advert isn't very sensitive and was inevitably going to cause a stir. But hang on a minute how could an experienced advertising agency not foresee that inevitability? How indeed... This was clearly the intended reaction from the beginning and from a business point of view PopChips' marketing people are absolute geniuses (or whatever the plural of that word is). Immoral some might say but with the amount of cash they could make from it who has time to worry about such insignificant things as morality.
The agency was able to easily predict how consumers would react to this advert and how it would benefit them. So much so it seems that they didn't even have to worry about the content of the campaign, which if I might say is pretty poor. They simply relied on the public and the increasingly annoying power of social media. Because of social networks and the immediacy they offer, the more susceptible members of the public compete over who gets to announce other peoples news the fastest, and who attracts the most attention by being the most outraged by it, eventually forgetting that it wasn't their news to share in the first place or that they didn't really care that much to begin with. This kind of attitude is going to be with us for some time and brands like PopChips are going to abuse us, and unfortunately we're going to let them...
Anyway because of the insensitivity of the advert and the way the public responded, social networks were a buzz, online news resources followed and then the traditional media reported the full story - because we turned it into one! However you look at it PopChips got a huge amount of coverage, hell I'm even writing about it now! If you agree that there's no such thing as bad publicity then PopChips got a free PR campaign. Of course if their core advertising campaign had been better than the confusing dating site thing they came up with, then it would have been even more successful. In an attempt to express their dissatisfaction with the campaign, the public played into the advertisers hands and had the opposite effect. Naturally PopChips responded some time after with an apology and amended the ad but they had already succeeded in their goal.
One thing I wonder though, is whether this campaign would ever have been made with Kutcher playing a black person? I would have to say no. Why? Well even though Hassan Minhaj is one of the people I referred to earlier, using any opportunity to make a claim for fame by whipping the public into a frenzy of political correctness, he's right about something. The advert was mainly for an American audience, where less Indian people reside compared to other races. Maybe as Minhaj suggests, the whole demographic was seen as an easy target.
Had they used a black character and similarly outdated stereotypes for instance, I expect that there would have been a lot more complaints, and perhaps rightly so. I'm not sure I would call this campaign racist, that has such strong implications, but this kind of blatant breach of ethics is not something you expect to see in 2012. I can see the business benefits of a campaign like this but personally, I wouldn't want my name anywhere near it! The silly thing is that despite their relative obscutrity, I loved PopChips before all this...
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