Julianna Romanazzi takes a deeper look into the relationships in the commercial from one of America’s favorite cereals.
Cheerios commercials are known for two main things: advertising an iconic, familiar breakfast cereal and blending marketing with snapshots of simple family interactions. Recently Cheerios came out with a new commercial, one featuring a recognizably nuclear family of a husband, wife, and daughter in their home. In this instance the family happens to be interracial.
As Joanna Schroeder remarked in her article there is nothing controversial about this commercial. She writes, “The majority of Americans don’t find biracial families controversial anymore.” Nevertheless, Youtube removed the commercial from its website when the ad’s comment section filled with racial remarks.
The ad features a white woman married, presumably, to a black man. Would the comments have been different, been more, been less, if the man was white and woman black? Would those who chose to comment have considered it a more “acceptable” form of racism? Or as long as the commercial presented the couple as a pairing other than the traditional Caucasian—Hispanic and Asian, Indian and someone with a discernable non-American accent—would the racist comments continued to have come in?
But the commercial has one interesting characteristic to it too. Why does the little girl go to her mother with her question instead of her father? What I mean to point out more precisely is, why did the ad creators choose to spend the majority of their ad time showing an interaction between a mother and daughter instead of an interaction between a daughter and her dad? The ad could have been situated in a number of ways and still contained the same basic information (Cheerios’ health benefits), the same adorable joke, and still made clear the girl came from an interracial family.
However, the people who created the Cheerios ad chose to situate it this way. At the beginning of the commercial the little girl says, “Mom, Dad told me that Cheerios is good for your heart. Is that true?” Maybe Dad is still asleep on the couch, maybe her idea for helping her father’s heart with the Cheerios just occurred to her or she is still processing what “good for your heart” might mean. In any case, if her father already told her Cheerios are good, why is she double-checking with her mother? Do moms in their stereotypical portrayals as the nurturing parent know more about food and health than dads? Though more and more commercials, from Huggies and Wells Fargo to Google Chrome, have been portraying father-child relationships, it’s still not the norm even as the makeup of American families continues to change. What does the ad say about fatherhood and does it say anything about black fatherhood in particular?
Leave a comment and tell us what you think.
See the original video below:
Read Joanna’s Schroeder’s take: “This Cheerios Ad is NOT Controversial“
Photo credit: Flickr / yaybiscuits123
I’d venture a guess that from a marketer perspective, the target audience here is not just about “who shops for groceries”, but also about “who worries about healthy food”, and “who ultimately decides what goes on the acceptable food items list”. Marketers dealing with cars and vacation years ago learned to address the person with “gating power” – the person with power to say “no, that’s not a good purchase for us”. Market research has shown that for a lot of items, that’s usually the woman in the family. I would not be surprised if that’s also the case here… Read more »
I hadn’t thought about that but on reflection the marketers are targeting mums cos they deduced that the mum in families does much of the shopping. if market research shows this is the case makes sense to target the mum.
To sam and tuiweni: I agree with you on the basis of market research. If moms are in fact still doing much of the household shopping, it makes sense that advertisers would put the pitch for a product toward moms. But one of the points I wanted to make is that there is still a lot (not all) of advertising out there that only portrays mother-child interactions and shows little of fathers interacting with their kids. What about stay at home dads? They’re on the rise and if they do the majority of purchasing in their households, would it make… Read more »
Mom does the shopping, right? So let’s make our commercial put her as the head of household.