Interesting topic. I was tangentially involved the industry during that Burger King stuff. That entire campaign was a real gamble to attempt a completely different paradigm in advertisement for a franchise that was nosediving in market share. And it worked. Totally saved Burger King at the time. Why did it work? Because if you recall we hadn't seen anything like that yet in commercial media. The weirdness and pointlessness of it generated a lot of earned media. People talking about it, basically. And the truth is flame broiled patties do look good on TV.
The other issue is advertisement does not work on White men. Never has. We don't waste money due to a variety of factors, not least among them the implicit expectation that we are providers and stable. And ultimately that's why the middle class has always been White even with stagnating wages for 50 years. When we make more than enough to live in poverty we tend to save and invest it, fix the things we have, etc. Women blow money like you cannot even comprehend when they are compensated well. The average woman making over 100K is still in credit card massive debt. And non-Asian minorities on average do not even conceptualize savings. So commercials cater to them, because they are most likely to spend their last $1 without a second thought. This is factual analysis inside advertising. And once you layer identity on top of those factors catering to minorities and women within a certain identity demographic it's almost a lock they will purchase your product. Which is why for decades advertising to blacks basically had a single message: This product is for black people. That's it. Now you see the same equation used for gays: This is for gays. That's it. No value comparison or pitch, like you would see in a product pitched to White males such as a truck.
When you suddenly see billboards for a product your forgot about, like Mike & Ike candies, that are nothing more than the item, that's just a scheduled write off. They launch these campaigns to restore brand awareness every 5-10 years and that's all they require. When a company is failing or starting out is when they roll out the creative stuff.
And what they are not telling you, and internally refuse to even acknowledge, is how much damage persisting in pairing White women with black males is doing to a lot of brands. But because BlackRock own a chunk of all companies and all of their competitors it's a wash. They have to do what Larry Fink says, because it doesn't matter if Adidas or Nike gain a percentage of market share, they are all rolled into the same macro now, and the profit margin is the same at the top. If Nike rebels BlackRock just shift their support to the competitor and now Adidas is the #1 brand, not Nike. There is no market anymore. So advertising is no longer about convincing you to buy a thing, it's about convincing certain populations of a reality that does not naturally occur as part of a social engineering program.
