One of the reasons The Worldwide Leader has grown to the level it has is because it quickly quashes anything that has a hint of controversy associated with it. So it’s kind of a shocker that ad agency Anomaly nearly got their campaign for ESPN’s college basketball programming starring “crude stereotypes of students at specific colleges” past them, especially when you read exactly what the mildly-offensive stereotypes were.
(”Who were the ad wizards behind that one?”)
AWFUL ANNOUNCING first broke the news days ago with a full list of the hilariously quasi-racist casting calls they were looking to “represent” a number of schools. Unfortunately, USA TODAY now reports the ad campaign has been canned because the campaign “in no way represent ESPN or the respect we have for the college community.”
As you will see, that’s a big shame.
We’re not going to copy-and-paste the entire casting call sheet here - you should however head over to AWFUL ANNOUNCING for it, it’s a doozy - but we will reprint a few highlights we noticed. Our top 3:
[ ILLINOIS ]
MALE. African-American. Young Obama. Think Toofer-the straight-laced, Harvard grad write r from 30 Rock (Keith Powell)>
That’s called being topical! Number 2:
[ NOTRE DAME ]
MALE He’s an ASIAN kid who is in to all things Notre Dame, ridiculously so. Oh, and he’s always fighting. Every time we encounter him he always has some words or another, be it the faint traces of a black eye, or a scab or whatever. He epitomizes the fightin’ Irish.
An Asian kid at Notre Dame? That’s completely outlandish! But numero uno has to go to this gem:
[ TENNESSEE ]
FEMALE. Tennessee is orange crazy. The ice tray in her orange fridge, that freezes the water she dyes orange, is that orange. The party girl cowboy hat she wears is a white and orange zebra print. The tattoo on her lower back is Pantone 3 for that Tennessee orange. The only thing that’s not orange is her dog, which is the20mascot Smokey. Did we mention she’s crazy? A slutty girl who would hang out at the cowgirl hall of fame.
One can only imagine the writers got their inspiration from this news story and photo, you know, because she’s crazy and super-hot:
One can only hope these ads find a home somewhere, either produced by the company or as some kind of fan fiction. This is the exactly what Al Gore had in mind when he invented the Internet.
4:34 pm on November 14th, 2008
That's a shame. This ad campaign could have made millions!
12:39 am on November 15th, 2008
they could have had a girl railing 8-balls for U of A
10:25 am on November 17th, 2008
It is beyond silly to get worked up over this. This is an ad agency trying to draw people into a commercial. It's completely normal for them to want to add some color to the characters. And in doing so it is perfectly natural (1) to try to associate with a picture of some kind of kid people might think actually might be found at a particular school and (2) to caricature the characters to some extent.
Shame on you for falling into the trap of labeling these characters as "racist" "stereotypes." It is people like you who are treating them as generalizations, not the writers and not ESPN. "Awful" fits this story all right.