Filed under: Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising
This post is part of our Ads Gone Bad series. Share your thoughts and memories of this ad in the comments, and be sure to check out our other posts on marketing gone wrong.
Thanks to our unfortunate history with slavery and the subsequent economic slavery imposed on minority Americans, we as a nation are very sensitive to charges of racism. So sensitive, in fact, that advertisers are often accused of such transgressions for the slightest intimation. Six Flags (NYSE: SIX), the amusement park chain, found this out recently.
The park created what I thought was a clever series of ads contrasting the humdrum routine of ordinary life with the thrills to be found at a Six Flags park. For example, one ad showed a lumpy teen attempting to dance, another a chortling woman teasing her cat with a laser pointer, both compared to gleeful coaster riders at Six Flags.
The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund found these ads offensive, however, because the head of an Asian man’s face appeared in a bubble, rating the degree of fun, rated in number of flags, of each recreation. His accent (Japanese, I thought) and his easy but hyper-enthusiastic phrasing (”two flags,” for the dancer and laser wielder, “six flags” for the coaster, followed by the tag line “More flags, more fun.”) recommended a stereotypical English-challenged outsider.
I guess my racism detector isn’t that finely calibrated. I saw him as a positive character, the one who “got it” while the “two flags” characters didn’t. But then again, I’m a white middle-class American male. How many times do you suppose I’ve suffered from racism?
Six Flags didn’t seem too concerned about the implied racism, refusing to comment on it for the press. Nevertheless, I expect coming ads for the chain will be very carefully constrained to avoid a repeat of this incident.
In this case, charges of racism
See other examples of Ads Gone Bad.
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