LG just paid a boatload of money for an ad that portrays men and boys as unable to understand a refrigerator.
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Terrific. Just what western civilization needed.
LG has just released an ad titled “Just Like Magic” that shows a boy standing in front of the refrigerator. He is unable to reach out and take some food until his mother shows him how the refrigerator works. After which he just walks off, not even acknowledging her help. Meanwhile her voice over describes him as “a deer in the headlights” and asks “where he got that from?”
Then the dad appears, opens the fridge and stares in the same way. The mom, smug to the point of being caustic, notes her seemingly dull witted husband is the “tree from which the apple fell.”
To which I would like to pose a few questions for Hill Holliday, the agency of record as well as LG, the client for this ad.
1) Do you think your target is women who are living some kind of 1950’s retro nightmare?
2) Do you think that men do not open refrigerator door, much less purchase groceries, cook meals, and yes, annually spring clean said refrigerators?
3) Do you think snarky comments by women against their spouses is cute? Funny? Will gain you market share on the Lifetime network?
4) How do you think the women of America would like an ad where a bemused man was calling his wife “a deer in the headlights” as she stared, dull witted, at the engine of the car in the family garage?
I just took delivery on an LG fridge and I am so ready to ship it back its it killing me. And if this ad will piss off men, let me tell you, it should REALLY piss of women, who have been working to get men to contribute to the domestic workload. This ad basically grants men the right to default to infantilized zombies in the kitchen which, I gather, is where a lot of house work takes place. This ad is not a helpful contribution to the struggle for gender equality. And a casual dismissal for all the hard work men are doing in the home.
LG, take this ad off the internet and off the air. Your multi-million dollar agency has made you look ignorant, divisive and about fifty years behind the times. Whomever on your marketing team green lighted this condescending tripe has done damage to your brand.
You can do better.
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Want to tell LG what you think?
Tweet to @LGUS
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LG’s “Men Are Stupid” Ad insults both sexes, so who is it aimed for? http://t.co/DAW4HlvMNF via @goodmenproject
— anneboysen (@aftermillennial) May 13, 2014
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I really don’t see what the fuss is about; it’s just a commercial. It didn’t say anything about men being stupid; just the two guys in the commercial. I guess if you dig deep enough, you’ll find gold
Why are you posting this on a men’s site?! Men just don’t care about people’s objectification, didn’t you know about that? They find it ridiculous that someone will cry over it. That’s just natural that we will want to see people objectified in a way we enjoy, like the guy in this ad. Don’t get so emotional, please. I mean, that’s what I have have learned with MEN, mostly straight men, who are humans with much more rationality and clarity than me, a woman. They always teach me things, like “I will only care about women’s “sexual objectification” or degradation… Read more »
Great article, this needs to get called out more Mark.
And I’d love to see how the dull witted wife staring into a car’s engine compartment commercial would go over!
The ad is just awful for so many reasons. Why would any company think this would help sell their products or help their image???
I couldn’t agree more. In fact I found this page by googling “LG refrigerator ad insulting.” I am constantly amazed these days how careful we are not to offend women, different nationalities, minorities, etc, but its totally okay to bash men. This new acceptance of being HIGHLY offensive to men is mind boggling to me! Hiw is it okay to discriminate in this way when no other type of discrimination is acceptable? This ad is deeply rude, horribly degrading and highly offensive. It makes me want to never ever buy an LG appliance again! Men are not asinine imbeciles anymore… Read more »
Does anyone know who the female VoiceOver talent is in this LG ad?
Leslie Mann. She plays in the movie coming out (might be out already) “The Other Woman” with Cameron Diaz and Kate Upton.
But.. if we where to boycott said commercials for portraying men as dumb. How about all those commercials that portray women as objects?
Why is one okay, and not the other?
If we where to boycott all products that portray men and women like this, we end up, unable to buy anything…
True, but not quite in the way you think. In my country there is an official “watchgroup” where people can complain about debasing, insulting and discriminating commercials. 90% of those complaints are about objectification of women and usually it ends with the company being required to pull the campaign. I once complained there about some posters which showed a ripped, nude male model being groped by a woman, and his head was cut off by the top edge of the poster. Classic objectification. The reply from the watchgroup was “Yeah, we told them to maybe be more sensitive next time,… Read more »
After massive campaigns like “Not buying it” I submit that ads that portray women as objects are not seen as okay anywhere to the degree as ads that portray men as a dumb.
I don’t want to get into a long debate about how women are portrayed as objects here. But I will say this as a woman, I do not agree at all that ads that portray women as objects are seen as “not okay”. That has not been mine or many women’s experience in our culture. I am actually stunned by any belief that somehow when advertising targets women it’s “easier” for women or people are somehow more socially conscious about it. I seriously am stunned. They are everywhere and anywhere and always around. And guess what? Women live with the… Read more »
THIS^
Sure. Maybe that’s why ads that portray women as objects happen much, much more often than ads that portray men as a dumb.
Yeah, this was totally condescending. We’ve come to degrade men and women in different ways through media. Women for their bodies and men being portrayed as passively ignorant and/or dumb. This isn’t even positive imagery of wife/motherhood. I certainly don’t want to see women condescending to the men they should be there the most for. Unfortunately, we use women’s bodies to sell products and men get put into equally degrading roles albeit differently from women. I think we have to have a conversation around why some women may respond to this imagery. I think it has to do with some… Read more »
I agree we all stare into the fridge from time to time. My issue with this ad is in regards to how the characters here behave in relationship to each other, and what that behavior Implies about American men, women and boys. What jars me the most is the numb entitlement and indifference the boy shows toward receiving assistance from his mother. Followed by how the mother implies that his behavior is somehow the father’s fault alone; a man thing of some sort. It is these sarcastic invocations and normalizations of all that is wrong with our culture that are… Read more »
I totally agree with you Mark. “We live the stories we tell” is spot on.
I would like to add that we shoudl remind ourselves “we live the stories we tell” when we look at any kind of media. Pornography should be included in that. “We live the stories we tell” is a powerful way to look at it.
What happened to smart funny ads? The age of rudeness and mediocrity is upon is upon us and unfortunately permeates everything in our culture. Only solution is protesting, expressing that it is unacceptable behavior and boycotting and supporting good ads and campaigns.
I think the ad portraits a timing issue… that a person (not only men, I’ve seen women stare at the fridge like that too) stares at the fridge it’s not because they believe in magic, it’s because they are thinking… what’s disrespectful is not asking and just thinking you know what othee people want… I think not onlt women can make that mistake… Anyway, I think the ad company thinks more of stereotypes about their customers, maybe the ad is a symbolism that the company thinks they know about their target.
The ad is disgraceful. The intent may have been humor, but the effect is deeply insulting.
Thanks for the update to the page 🙂
Not even the right agency and that is your headline! yhoo.it/1mUVEEe
it’s Hill Holliday.
These types of ads are all over the place, and they are infuriating! One of the things I encourage women to do (it’s in my book, Men are Great, in the chapter about what we can do) is to boycott products that an ad is selling, if that commercial/ad has put men down. A few years ago, there was a t-shirt being sold by Macy’s (I think it was Macy’s – a big dept store, anyway) that said “Boys are Stupid – Throw Rocks at Them”, and the local women got the store to stop selling them. There was a… Read more »
Will your men do the same for you, with the same strenght? By what I read from men in this blog, I doubt so.
Another piece of evidence that misogyny is usually at the same time misandry and vice versa. Ultimately it means that what it really is, is crap, and it has to go.
WOW! I’m so shocked that yet ANOTHER campaign is based on men being stupid and women being superior. She belittles her husband/father of her children, any wonder why marriages don’t last? As a divorce lawyer for men, I can say that it is this type of malebashing that leads to the loss of respect between spouses and then they land in our office. If the roles were reversed and the “little woman” was belittled there’d be a huge outcry. But it’s just us men, who will most likely try to shrug it off as “just funny” which is what happened… Read more »
Marriages don’t last for many, many reasons. As a divorce lawyer, you should know the other side of the coin is even more violent; the type of female bashing and violent abuse they receive doesn’t even lead to the loss of respect between spouses, men already enter relationships with lack of respect for women.
These piss me off too. My husband cooks more than I do and does all of the grocery shopping – usually with our 3 year old son in tow. I can assure you that if anything, I would be the one looking like a deer in headlights trying to figure out a new fridge. Are there really women who respond to ads like this? I mean, they surely do focus groups or something.