'PROTECTION' | Miller Lite spot evokes 'Sopranos'
Miller Lite beer's new "Protection" campaign, prominently featuring actor Frank Vincent from the HBO mobster hit "The Sopranos," is being pulled after Chicago representatives of the Italian-American community lashed out over the stereotypical mafia depiction of Italian Americans in the ads.
In one commercial, Vincent and his sidekick enter a convenience store and ask the clerk if he needs "protection." The clerk, pointing to a Miller Lite container, says he's got all the protection he needs, which prompts an exaggerated "oh!" from Vincent and his sidekick. In a commercial set in a bar, Vincent asks -- in a threatening tone -- if the bartender needs protection. When the bartender says "no," Vincent asks if he's a wiseguy.
"We seem to be the last breed in America that ad agencies think they can take a shot at," said Lou Rago, founder of the Italian American Human Relations Foundation of Chicago, who helped spearhead the effort to force the new Miller Lite ads off the air. The campaign, created by DraftFCB/Chicago, was to run through the summer, but MillerCoors said it will remove the ads within a week.
On Monday, Rago participated in a conference call with MillerCoors executives who indicated they might consider running fewer of the "Protection" commercials. But when Rago and Anthony Baratta, the Chicago-based national chairperson for the Commission for Social Justice, said that was unacceptable and that they would call for a boycott of MillerCoors by Italian Americans, the brewery had by Tuesday decided to dump the entire campaign.
2 comments:
Gentlemen,
While I’m acutely aware of the almost universal and rather casual attempts in the various media to denigrate and/or diminish the accomplishments of the Italian people and even to challenge the integrity and essential character as this incredibly talented cultural group, having Italian/Italian American actors/producers/directors contributing mightily to these productions is not helpful. Coercing Miller Coors to remove the ads is appropriate, but Italian-American organizations might want to lobby the Italian American actors/producers/directors and impress upon them that such activities contribute to negative and even pernicious stereotyping. Otherwise it will be construed by other groups, quite reasonably, as pure hypocrisy.
It is true that pressure should be exerted on Italian and Italian-American producers and actors to reject roles and productions that play into stereotypes. But it's naive to expect that all individuals will always put their interests as members of an ethnic community before their personal and career interests. It's also incoherent and therefore not 'reasonable' to apply a term like "hypocrisy" to a group instead of an individual. Using it in this way implies that the claims of individuals are somehow lessened if they are not shared by all members of the group to which they belong. But it's the essence of stereotyping to regard the members of an ethnic group as thinking and acting 'as one' and not as individuals. The wrongness of stereotyping Italians in the ways that are commonly still done in the media is quite independent of whether or not there are individual Italians and Italian-Americans who, for their own reasons, are willing to accept it or benefit from it.
Post a Comment