Wednesday Morning Rant

Since before Trump's reelection but especially after, there has been a question lingering in the minds of many. It goes along the lines of, "have we finally achieved Peak Woke?" I don't know, but I know that the question has been arising more often this year than in years prior. Ever since the Dylan Mulvaney debacle with AB-InBev, this was a question that it was suddenly - very suddenly - acceptable to ask. The displeasure with Wokeness has been rising, sometimes barely perceptibly, since then.

But it is very hard to tell. Wokeness in all its forms is so deeply embedded in American (and, more broadly, Western) institutions that it is by no means vanquished merely because Trump won and at least a plurality of people got publicly fed up with tranny madness. But there are indicators that are promising in terms of entertainment and associated products. This is a tricky barometer because the production lead time on such things is very long and entertainment is often slow to pivot to a new reality. The queue of crap that got a green light years ago has to drain. But there is one exception to this, a category with (relatively) quick turnaround: advertising.

I have seen a marked shift in advertising in the past few months, both on terrestrial broadcast and on streaming. It isn't sweeping yet, but it appears to be there. There are some ads I am seeing in fairly heavy rotation that would never have been made a few years ago because they're surprisingly normal. The first is for a place I've never heard of or seen in real life, which is a gas station or truck stop:

A grown man going to visit his father and bringing some (through implication) decent coffee with him. That's it. Two men who appear normal. Neither is a buffoon. They're both white. It's shockingly regressive, and I see this ad frequently. There's a similar one starring a dude and his wife that's also pretty normal. Unusual, to say the least.

Then there's one I've seen frequently on terrestrial broadcast, which is from a company known not necessarily for in-your-face wokeness in advertising, but definitely for trendiness and trend-setting: Apple. Their new wireless earbuds have a "hearing aid" feature and I've seen various iterations of this long-form ad chopped up for television:

That's a great ad, if you go for saccharine over-the-top sentimentality. But set aside whether that's your thing or not, and look at what it is: a mother and father and daughter, having Christmas together, from the father's perspective. Nobody is denigrated. Nobody is being told to check his privilege or put down for his original racial or sexual sins. It's just a dude who's grateful for his improved hearing with his family, and a family that is grateful to him. The cast look like they actually could be a family. It's astonishingly normal, and a radical break from recent trends.

Even Wal-Mart is getting in on the action in what appears to be the new trend of "normality in advertising for Christmas '24" - albeit by riding on the shoulders of other (somewhat old) entertainment properties:

Some of their other ads are less good but even they're markedly toned down from the kind of stuff we saw last year or in 2022. From cars for affluent middle-aged people to headphones for trendy young people, ads are looking increasingly old. They show the product and its features. They show people doing things. Even when diversity quotas are still clearly on display like in the ad for headphones, they aren't being too pushy about it compared to recent history - like in this monstrous ad for Marshall, on which I commented in a prior rant (don't comment on old threads).

Notable counterpoints like Jaguar aside, Wokeness appears to be waning in advertising. I don't know if this will hold up even through the season - let alone into the future - but I think it there is at least a touch of promise. I don't know whether it's because the economy is rough those and those Christmas season dollars are harder to come by so businesses genuinely must revert back to normality and cast a wider net or die, but from what I can tell, the slow movement toward something approaching normality in advertising appears to have sped up rather a lot in the past couple of months.

I just hope it's real.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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