Posted on 08/15/2013 9:29:31 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
A JCPenney back-to-school ad that implies kids will be friendless unless they wear the right clothing is promoting bullying, charged a flurry of critics on social media this week.
“Your ad about cool kids wearing JCPenney clothes, showing a child sitting alone at lunch is despicable,” fired off one Facebook user. Another added, “How clueless are you? What a horrible bully-promoting commercial.” Twitter users have called it “tone deaf” and “more self-immolation” for the company.
The ad, posted online by the retailer in late July and aired as part of a TV campaign earlier this summer, includes a shot of a kid in a school cafeteria, surrounded by friends. When the mom in the voice-over talks about the importance of buying her child cool school clothes, she notes, “I’ve been told this stuff can make or break your entire year.” At that moment, all the kids except for one disappear from the room.
That message was enough to prompt the national antibullying organization Stand for the Silent to kick off a campaign against the ad.
“My wife and I lost our 11-year-old son to suicide due to being bullied, and yes ma'am we do oppose this ad,” founder Kirk Smalley told Yahoo! Shine in an email. “We feel it does promote excluding kids that don't wear the ‘right’ clothes. This is totally against what we have spent our entire savings on and the last three years of our lives traveling to speak at schools and teach these kids. We've spoken at 715 schools and to over 740,000 kids and taught them, ‘You are somebody,’ and that you are not what you wear, what religion you believe, what color your skin, etc.”
(Excerpt) Read more at shine.yahoo.com ...
Where's the outrage at its racism?
K Mart promotes retard America the coming generation.
The K-Mart ads are disgusting. I can’t understand a word those mini-gangstas are saying — not that I want to. I hope their sales tank.
I think you're trying too hard to denigrate uniforms. Maybe one girl is happy in the photo and one is not.
Uniforms and dress codes prepare kids for the working world. Outside of 'the arts' professions sartorial creativity is not well accepted. To be honest, I'd say even they have kinds of uniforms, albeit unwritten.
I have never liked the Back-to-School clothing push. I find the JPC ad to be a reflection of cold reality rather than "promoting bullying." JPC's ad is safe and bland by comparison. K-Mart's is well deserving of backlash and outrage.
Black mob violence.
I have seen those K-mart ads and they are definitely catering to the ghetto culture - that is where all the money is! /s
Save 20% on Kevlar FUBU Hoodies. Only at Kmart.
Do it. I've sent three e-mails to K-Mart telling them how sick at my stomach that particular ad campaign makes me. They responded to the first two by talking about how "tongue-in-cheek" humor is an effective marketing tool. I wrote back that I failed to see any humor -- tongue-in-cheek or otherwise -- about encouraging 8-year olds to be gangster rappers. They haven't yet responded to my third e-mail and I don't expect a reply. So by all means, complain.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
They are targeting the pocketbooks of white suburban Americans so that is what they expect will be popular there.
More likely to find it at CheaperThanDirt though.
Should have stuck to ads with two moms and two dads. (/sarc)
I agree. Teach your kids how to defend themselves, then stand by them when the administration hauls them into the office for knocking the bully's front teeth out. What the Aussie kid did to the bully who was taunting him is the only thing bullies understand.
Oh yeah, that goes for bully nations as well.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
I agree with that. The JCP ad is nothing. "Buy our clothes if you want to be cool."
Big deal!
Even worse, the ad is false advertising. No way is JCP clothing cool or the “right” brand, and if someone was going to be subbed or beaten for having the wrong clothing, JCP clothing definitely wouldn’t solve the problem, but only make it worse.
Unfortunately true.
Ironically, I would probably be ostracized for wearing clothes that came from J C (knock knock knock) Penney.
In my experience, those who downplay the destructiveness of bullying tend to have been participants in it. The schools I went to, teachers, particularly phys ed, subtly promoted it in a host of ways.
And it is very destructive.
Today’s notion that it is aimed exclusively or primarily at “gay kids” is of course nonsense.
The idea that the answer is to beat up the bully is often on a par with the notion that the way to get along in prison is to immediately beat up the top dog in there. True, no doubt, but often easier said than done.
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