I just saw an ad from a new campaign for Cheez-It where they say: “At Cheez-It, we expect a lot from our cheese.” They show a wheel of cheese interrupting a scientist guy in a lab coat with lame jokes and immature behavior a few times and being rejected, until eventually the cheese wheel starts to act nice and is accepted. Then the announcer says: “We take the time for our cheese to mature before we bake it into every delicious cracker.” So let me get this straight: basically, once the cheese stops being a jerk and is finally agreeable, they murder it and put it in a cracker. That’s right, isn’t it? They’d better hope the cheese doesn’t have access to YouTube, because these ads are up there. After seeing one, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that the reward for good behavior is death, and they’ll be acting like delinquents indefinitely.
But maybe it wasn’t the plan to make them into crackers initially. Perhaps the cheese was meant for another purpose (like a hospice chaplain, for instance), but it’s so infuriating trying to train these intelligent wheels of cheese that the scientists grow impatient, finally snap, and kill them just when their behavior is finally reaching acceptability. Then they cover it up and make these ads, so it looks like baking the cheese into crackers is what they intended to do all along. Well, I’m not buying it!
This reminds me of a Burger King ad from a couple of years ago, where they had a chicken training with a Kung Fu master to have “just the right amount of kick”. It shows this chicken kicking over buildings, etc., until she finally gets it just right. And then what do they do? They kill her and make a sandwich out of her! No wonder they wanted her to kick less: so they could catch and kill her more easily! (I love this ad, but it did strike me this way as well.) And what a waste! It takes years and a lot of discipline and fortitude to learn and master Kung Fu; surely a better investment would have been to put the chicken into martial arts movies fighting other Kung Fu chickens. Oh, but cockfighting is illegal; excuse me! So we have no choice but to kill them and make sandwiches out of them, all because of the “PC” culture we live in. Well, at least I know I didn’t murder them with my narrow-minded attitude, man!
To see some of the ads in this Cheez-It campaign, go to the following links:
To see the BK Spicy Chick’n Crisp Sandwich ad, go to this link:
