Via HuffPo, the ads actually aren’t forbidden yet — the website’s still ticking away as I write this — but give the aggrieved a few days to get organized. Here’s what happens when Rousseau fans get bored:
Next week, Burger King kicks off a major ad campaign that involves a unique twist on the tried-and-true marketing technique of taste testing. The campaign is already generating controversy.
The No. 2 burger maker in the U.S. asked farmers in the Transylvania region of Romania, the Hmong tribe of Thailand, and other folks in far-flung places to sample its Whopper alongside McDonald’s Big Mac and declare the winner…
A headline on the blog Stereohyped read: “Burger King Storms Innocent Villages to Plunder ‘Virgins.’ ”
Another blogger, on Walletpop, wrote: “What might irk people is the concept that Burger King is taking its fat-laden fast food to people who aren’t used to this stuff in their diets, who aren’t usually subject to our crass commercials, and who probably don’t really care too much.”
Alan Siegel, chairman of Siegel + Gale, an Omnicom Group branding firm, warns that the ads “could be interpreted as the crass part of America talking to the Third World.”
Think of the boldfaced part as a variation on the debate over genetically modified foods. “You can’t feed that to starving people; it might make them sick.” Ace claims he can’t figure out what the left’s problem is here, but isn’t this just their standard fetishizing of a “simpler” culture whose supposed insensate brutishness demands our protection? They know nothing of corporate advertising. How are they supposed to resist the delicious hamburgers being foisted upon them? Flashback exit quotation: “I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal … awesome.”
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