Ohferfuck'ssake... Snickers Bars And Homo Outrage

By now everybody has heard about the great Snickers Commercial Controversy, brought about by a Super Bowl commercial. And here I was maligning this year's crop for being safe and tame just the other day. Little did I know.

Anyway, in the ad, two auto mechanic dudes eat a Snickers bar, one starting at one end, and one the other. They gobble their Snickers, and their lips end up touching. They freak out because they kissed, and decide they must immediately do something manly. So they rip handfuls of their chest hair out by the roots.

Ouch.

Snickers also had a website (no point in linking to it because it's gone now) where you could view the reactions of some of the Bears and Colts players. You could also look at three alternative endings to the commercial, and vote for your favorite. The winning spot was to air during the Daytona 500.

But all that's been called off now, because a bunch of buzz-kill homo advocates raised a stink.

Here is what the late Matthew Shepard's mother had to say:

“I am outraged that Mars, the NFL and these players would promote such an anti-gay message. This campaign encourages the same type of hate that led to the death of my son Matthew. It essentially gives ‘permission’ to our society to verbally or physically harass individuals who are gay, lesbian or bisexual,” said Judy Shepard, Executive Director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation. “In particular, I am dismayed that these players, who are role models to our young people, would participate in perpetuating such discrimination and prejudice.”

Oh, what the fuck ever. Look, lady, I'm sorry you lost your son. But a couple of caricature rednecks drinking motor oil, or doing the equivalent of that hillbilly dance from the Bugs Bunny cartoon, is not what killed your boy.

Let's face it. Those commercials were not condoning violence against homos, or even laughing at homos. They were poking fun at straight guys, yokels so concerned about their "manliness" after an accidental contact with another man, that they were willing to do downright silly things to ensure that they were still manly.

I thought the over-reactions were rather extreme, and thought that even more so when the entire campaign was dropped.

Then I read the official statement from Masterfoods (kind of like "masturbates," but with edible items).

As with all of our Snickers advertising, our goal was to capture the attention of our core Snickers consumer.

Feedback from our target consumers has been positive. In addition, many media and website commentators of this year’s Super Bowl commercial line-up ranked the commercial among this year’s top ten best. USA Today ranked it #9 of its top ten pick.

We know that humor is highly subjective and understand that some people may have found the ad offensive. Clearly that was not our intent. Consequently, we do not plan to continue to air the ad on television or on our Snickers website.

And I started to wonder if maybe it was deliberate. I mean, nobody's talked this much about Snickers bars since... Well, since ever.

So this tiny germ of an idea popped into my brain. Maybe cheesing off the homos, and galvanizing the beer-drinking, football-loving, NASCAR-watching fans was the plan all along. Maybe the marketing whizzes truly batted one out of the park, by alienating a small demographic that's not a big consumer of their product, in exchange for getting their core Snickers-eating audience all fired up.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But people are still talking about a commercial that wasn't THAT memorable, and a multi-million dollar advertising campaign that was scotched twenty-four hours after it was launched due to pressure from the gay lobby.

Either way, planned or accidentally, the Snickers execs have hit the jackpot with this one. People who had stopped caring about a product that has, let's face it, been around a LONG time, are going out of their way to eat Snickers bars to "show those homos that they don't run things around here."

Now THAT is the kind of brand loyalty you just can't buy.

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