28921247
28921247 on Hacker News
Tide ads don’t show every single stain their product could remove. Beer ads don’t show every type of person with a working esophagus. They’re trying to get black people to buy Pixel phones. Let’s not overthink this.
Unfortunately, since there are more than 7B people alive on earth and several more billion people who are dead, it would be quite difficult to feature literally all people in the copy. So they, like absolutely every product marketing copy that has ever featured people in the history of everything, included the people for which the actual product featured is targeting.
Aside from that, you can also infer from the negative view that the copy is implying that other phones do not represent the nuances of all people, which is the reason that they said it to begin with.
But you knew that already, didn’t you?
> Do you think black people striving for equality are looking for companies putting black people on their ads?
Absolutely. How else would a person with attributes typically ignored know that a product was designed for them? Ethnic hair care products is another example. Do you think only white people should be in ads for hair care products for African Americans?
Not really. Google wants black people to buy their phones because a featured they developed works better for their skin tone. Should companies who make smaller handsets be barred from advertising to women?
Reversing the distribution only sounds logical if you reduce your sample to this one instance and ignore the entire history of product marketing. Which is convenient for some people, and totally bonkers for anyone who isn’t CW&H.
Having to squint to find anyone who even remotely resembles you is the lived experience of millions of people. Perhaps you should reflect on why you can’t relate to people in an ad that look different from you? It’s a skill that someone of us don’t have the luxury of not developing.