I decided on this a couple of weeks ago. It was a long time coming and surprisingly didn’t come because of the Paris Hilton ad that people were upset about (although it is syptomatic of what bothers me). What did it for me was that they started re-airing a TV ad with a somewhat overweight groggy looking young man who is “on his own” for the first time and can’t even open a bag of cereal (and ends up spilling it all over the place). The ad has the tagline “Without us, some guys would starve.” (It’s part of a series.)

What I realized after seeing this ad is that I’m sick and tired of Carls Jr. treating us (the people viewing the ads) like stupid cattle. Every ad they do is demeaning to all people treating us like we’re oogling, naive, hormonally driven apes. It’s just disgusting. Just to list a few:

– “If it doesn’t get all over the place, it doesn’t belong in your face” series
– “Without us, some guys would starve” series
– “GET OFF” (the freeway) billboards
– Sexy women riding bulls and cars (washing anyway) eating oversized burgers they can barely get in their mouth

And I really do mean EVERY ad. I challenged my brother last weekend to come up with an ad that they’ve done in the last five years that wasn’t demeaning. He was unable to name one.

So here’s the challenge: if you can tell me about an ad that they’ve done in the last 5 years that wasn’t demeaning, I’ll end my ban. I’m pretty sure I won’t be eating their anytime soon. And if you can’t think of an ad that isn’t demeaning, you should personally ban them too.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2005 at 9:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.