Social Graces???

Do advertisers and corporations have any moral responsibility to their audiences? I’m talking about the three new Cheetos commercials, which blew me away with the mean spiritedness and maliciousness of the protagonists asking me to eat Cheetos and join the Orange Underground. How did the advertising company think viewers would react to a commercial that promotes being mean and doing inappropriate and hurtful things? Like putting Cheetos up someone’s nose; destroying someone’s clean laundry with Cheetos; and smearing Cheetos around someone’s clean office.

These commercials are not clever, subversive or funny; there’s just annoying, like a hormonally-charged junior-high-school student with no social graces who sits next to you on the subway, farts, laughs, and runs out of the car screaming.

There’s an article in Slate calling the Cheetos ads delightfully creepy. I found nothing creepy about them. The Slate article quotes one of the advertising executives explaining the commercials as geared towards non-prudish, edgy, prankster adults. I don’t find screwing with people for its own sake to be amusing or clever. Not even when I was eleven. This ad campaign really turned me off to Cheetos, and I used to be a big fan. I’ll avoid them from now on. Especially since UTZ has a tasty version of the same snacks, in both crunchy and puffed versions.