Bigots Don't Deserve Cookies Anyway.
June 27, 2012
I don’t normally stray into the political conversation, but an idea instantly popped into my head yesterday when I saw this picture. Well to be more exact I was inspired by some of the comments that picture has been getting.
That picture was posted by Oreo as a part of their Facebook advertising campaign for the 100th anniversary of Oreo cookies. It has sparked a lot of response. At the time I write this it has been a little over a day since it was posted and the image has been liked over 200,000 times, shared over 50,000 times and has over 30,000 comments. Most of them are positive comments praising Oreo for being the latest in a list of companies taking a stand on this issue. There are however a bunch of comments about people all up in arms over this, saying they’ll never buy Oreos ever again. Some people are saying that this is a big mistake by Kraft Foods, Oreo’s parent company. They say that they’ll lose a lot of business by supporting equal rights for the LGBT community. Well I have something for these people to think about.
I took a few classes in marketing while I was in college, and while I don’t claim to be an expert on the matter I did learn enough to know that Kraft Foods, a Fortune 500 company, currently ranked in 50th place with over $54 billion in profits last year is one of the biggest food companies in the world. Any company that huge has an equally huge marketing department, and these guys are smart, I mean really fucking smart. You don’t make it into the Fortune 500 with a dumb marketing department. These guys know that the ads they run could easily make or break the company. They did their market research, they crunched the numbers, and I can assure you, the very reason they ran that ad is because they knew they’d gain more customers in doing so, than they would lose. The comments they’ve been getting on Facebook supports this.
Finally, if you are offended by this comic, and the stance it takes, that is fine. You are welcome to your opinion. If this comic enrages you to the point that you’ll never read Kickass McAwesome ever again, that’s fine too. If that’s the way you feel, I probably didn’t want you as a reader to begin with.