"Charitable causes trivialized" at the Super Bowl

Ad Age critic Bob Garfield offers a critical take on "cause marketing gone wrong" at this year's Super Bowl ads. His point about the rhetorical link between illegal drugs & caffeine-and-sugar-stim is spot on, echoing a point I've taken heat for any number of times: namely, you can't expect kids to take the anti-drug message seriously when we openly market caffeine for its energizing power.

There's a lot of good stuff in this video, even if some of it (i.e., the save-the-children-from-the-godfather-ad bit) goes a bit overboard. Garfield's take on the Dell Red ad is well worth noting: it turns AIDS into a "chick magnet." And be sure to watch long enough (around 4:30) for an essential critique of McDonald's senseless conflation of its "I'm Lovin' It" slogan with cancer. Garfield's core point: our "ROI culture" seems to have erased an earlier generation's understanding of the rhetoric of corporate charity and branding.