Diversity ads

Filed under: Improving Society, Net Video, Queer, Race/Ethnicity
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I feel like there's been an amazing spate of pro-diversity advertising in the past week. Some links:

  • A new Cheerios Super Bowl commercial, a sequel to their sweet interracial-family ad from last year. (Last year, the Cheerios VP of marketing said: “Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families and we celebrate them all.”)
  • Coca-Cola's lovely “It's Beautiful” ad, featuring the song “America the Beautiful” with different lines in seven different languages: English, Tagalog, Spanish, Hebrew, Hindi, Keres, and Senegalese-French. (That latter link has brief interviews with the seven young women who did the singing.) I've always loved this tune, and I really like these performances of it; I'm looking forward to getting a downloadable copy of the song. I like the images in the ad, too.
  • Only sort of an ad: Google's awesome rainbow-colored Olympic doodle.
  • Bell Canada's Olympics ad shows a gay couple kissing (for just a moment, at 0:23).
  • Scandinavian sporting-goods retailer XXL provides a 2-minute ad, “Airport Love,” that I found kind of mystifying for a while, but all becomes clear.
  • Chevrolet has a new pair of Olympics ads: “The New” and “The New Us.” Both show diverse families, including gay male couples.

I'm especially astonished and thrilled that corporate America is so directly and explicitly and outspokenly embracing diversity. This kind of advertising has been happening here and there in small ways for a long time, but I can't remember any other time when four major high-profile diversity-themed TV commercials from three American corporate giants have aired in one week.

While I'm here, here are a couple of other good videos, not ads per se, on the theme of official Russian homophobia:

  • The Canadian Institute of Diversity and Inclusion provides a cute and funny 30-second Luge ad.
  • All Out has created a heartbreaking two-minute Olympics-themed video, #LoveAlwaysWins.
  • Delightfully silly 4-minute musical song-and-dance extravaganza “Mother Russia” (though it has a couple of unfortunate lines).

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