I need to alert all readers of this column to an insidious menace facing our nation, threatening our lives, liberties, pursuits of happiness and the taste of ice cream.
If we don’t come to terms with this nefarious threat, we’ll all probably be stricken with halitosis, split ends and other heinous issues.
I’m of course talking about ads for jeans.
Apparently, a very comely actress by the name of Syndey Sweeney was a model for American Eagle Jeans, the print and video ads of which tend to show her with the catchphrase “she has great jeans.”
It’s cute, a play on words, puts an American product in the common zeitgeist and, for someone like me that’s been in this business for a while, hearkens back to a time when an ad was designed to sell an item and portrayed said item in the most flattering way possible.
Except for some reason, the enlightened masses of a certain political stripe see this not as an ad for selling clothing, but as a way to further the cause of Nazi propaganda.
In essence, Sweeney, and by extension American Eagle, are fascists of the highest water, simply because Sweeney is beautiful.
What kind of mindset does it take to make such an accusation? Toward what end will making that accusation serve? My mind is boggled.
To equate a marketing campaign to Nazi propaganda is patently ridiculous. From my vantage point, it’s driven simply by hate — hate for beauty, hate for normalcy, and yes, hate for conservatives and President Trump. Why else would something so innocuous merit such vitriol.
By comparison, ads that feature celebrities like Lizzo, or that feature a cavalcade of DEI checkmarks (I refer you to the Jaguar ad that feature no cars, or the Bud Light campaign featuring Dylan Mulvaney), or that embrace absurdity (I refer you to the Skittles commercial that features a man milking a giraffe) are lauded as cutting edge.
Having been married to an advertising executive for more than two decades, we constantly talk about the ads we’ve seen and whether or not they actually intended to sell an item. I can’t recall an ad that I found to be compelling; even the always touted but increasingly pointless Super Bowl ad frenzy that for years has been off-putting. That feeling, believe it or not, actually affects a company’s bottom line, because potential customers are smarter than the average bear.
As proof of that, Jaguar, after that bizarre campaign, saw sales fall off by more than 75 percent, and Bud Light lost its top spot on the light beer mountain. Basically, insulting the customer base will end up being costly.
So, insulting a beautiful woman, and defaming a marketing campaign as Nazism, is the wrong way to go and only will serve to further divide. It probably would have been better to just not look at the ad and even go so far as not buy that brand of jeans.
Moreover, the people making these claims are the same people wanting equality and equity of outcome, claiming all kinds of rights exist for everyone. To segregate a specific group is bigotry, whether that group is conservative, or white, or beautiful, or whatever.
Ads are used as sales tools, never being designed to be hateful, so the Karens of the consumer world can chill and let everyone make of this what they want. Kindness and consideration go a really long way.
Tony Farkas is editor of the Trinity County News-Standard and the San Jacinto News-Times. He writes opinion columns and his views don’t necessarily reflect those of this newspaper. He can be reached at tony@polkcountypublishing.com.
