Wednesday, February 16, 2011

918 people died to bring you this billboard.

(click billboard, via adrants) I'm all for dark borrowed interest humor in advertising—as long as it makes a scrap of sense. This Jonestown riffing ad for a Michigan Mexican restaurant chain does not. Says La Señorita's VP of Sales and Marketing Jeff Leslie: "...we know that not everyone will get the humor of our ads and we accept that, we do not expect that our ads will offend people." Yes, we won't "get" it. Maybe if it was for a Guyanese restaurant? No. Previously in inappropriate ad humor:
9/11.
anorexia.
The Blind.
Alzheimer's.
the bp oil spill.
domestic violence.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

disagree. hilarious!

6:29 PM  
Blogger Joe Crawford said...

I'm sure their justification is most people are ignorant of the etymology of "drinking the Kool-Aid."

Offensive.

6:42 PM  
Anonymous -1-T-M- said...

STUPID & FOR THE RECORD according to Wikipedia:

The poison at Jonestown was mixed not with Kool-Aid but a similar product, Flavor Aid.

Flavor Aid (similar to Kool-Aid drink mix) is a non-carbonated soft drink beverage made by Jel Sert in West Chicago, Illinois, introduced in 1929. It is sold throughout the United States as an unsweetened powdered concentrate drink mix.

"Drinking the Kool-Aid" refers to the 1978 Jonestown Massacre; the phrase suggests that one has mindlessly adopted the dogma of a group or leader without fully understanding the ramifications or implications: at Jonestown, Jim Jones's followers followed him to the end: all the Peoples Temple members drank from a metal vat containing a mixture of "Flavor Aid", Cyanide, and prescription drugs Valium®, Phenergan®, and chloral hydrate.

7:25 PM  

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