Author: Susan X Jane

Susan X Jane, Principal of Navigators Consulting, has over 30 years of experience exploring race and representation in both the public and private sectors.  Susan is a transracial adoptee—a Black woman raised in a White family and community—an experience that created an early focus on the way race shapes our concept of ourselves and each other. Susan has worked to address race and racism as a community organizer, nonprofit program developer, professor of communications, and consultant to corporations and impact-focused institutions.  As Principal of Navigators Consulting, she draws on decades of experience to work with organizations in the public and private sectors. To any who seeks to build a better world, she offers her skills as a teacher, coach, and strategic partner to help create diverse and inclusive environments where the humanity of all is respected and protected.

More Ball, Less Boobs: SMNTKS Super Bowl Ad Review

Getting those snacks ready for tomorrow?  Don’t forget your pad and pencil for scoring a full card of million-dollar commercials.  Make sure you are the master of water cooler chat with this smntks primer on the slate of ads.  What’s going to be hot?

Puppies!!

Yup, soft, fuzzy bouncy bundles of joy–everybody loves ’em, even big boy advertiser Budweiser who will feature a sweet, sweet blonde golden retriever for family friendly brand buzz without the typical T and A you might expect from the Super Bowl.  With an increase in customer push back on inappropriate ads, puppies are as safe as blue chip stock.  Budweiser’s already enjoyed lots of pre game buzz with this ad, and with the cute butt in this ad it’s sure to get shared long after the game is done.

Super First Timers

Several advertisers from brand new and old will be making their first appearance at the big game.  Cheerios, covered here, and Heinz make their first appearance despite over century combined in business and newbie tech company Squarespace will join them with a horror-themed spot that will make you rethink browsing.

Drives off the Field

Eating up lots of commercial time, car companies will be wowing us with adventures thrilling and bizarre.  Volkswagen’s angels, Jaguar’s spies, Hyundai’s super dad and the muppets all make a play for car lovers’ cache.

Whole Lotta Love

There are fewer super sexual ads, but that doesn’t mean love is off limits.  Axe, Chobani and Chevy all rev up the love meter.  Don’t expect any kind of rom-com you’re used to.  Dictator’s gone lovestruck, yogurt stains and a bull in the mood for love make these ads more funny or strange than flirty.

Without a fratboy’s-eye-view of the ladies scheduled for tomorrow, smntks is looking forward to some good football.  And the ads–are you likely to surface from the Super Bowl with a shopping list?  Probably not–these big day ads are all about growing our warm fuzzy feelings for featured brands.  Don’t expect the hard sell with tomorrow’s ads, but with all the money and eyeballs, you’ll definitely have some ads worth talking about for your Monday morning quarterbacking.

Cheerios Graces Superbowl With Interracial Family’s Return

Sunday’s Super Bowl is here!  If you can’t decide between the Seahawks and the Broncos then you’re probably one of millions of Americans that tune in to the big game to see the commercials.  The Super Bowl is the single biggest draw for advertisers all year.  With a $4 million price tag for every 30 seconds, all the advertisers are going to want the biggest bang for their buck.  Cheerios is making their first Super Bowl ad debut in the 48 year history of the game.

This spot, entitled Gracie is a follow up starring the interracial family from this summer’s spot, discussed right here on smntks.  So when General Mills finally decides to pony up the $133,000 per second for an ad on the big day, they choose to feature a family that created more controversy than any other Cheerios pitchman.  What gives?

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What gives is that Gracie and her interracial TV Mom and Pop turn out to be good business.  When Gracie first appeared in the summer, trolls tweeted out a host of hateful comments about the ad and interracial families in general.  That would have been  a sad end to the story, but haters weren’t the only ones that took to the web.

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Many more thousands of people weighed in with their support for the positive representation of interracial families.  Cheerios themselves celebrates We are the 15% , a real world group formed in support of families like Gracie’s own fictitious folks.  Social media and mainstream talk also weighed in to support what is increasingly a portion of the continuum of normal families in America.  The moral of this story?  The changing face of America has a place and space in mainstream media.

Gracie’s return to the airwaves should come as no surprise to her many supporters.  What is more interesting is that General Mills is willing to put 4 million cheerios front and center  Super Bowl Sunday to bet on the mass appeal of a multiracial household.    Running the ad on the biggest day of the year tells us that when all was said and done in the summer, customers responded positively to the representation of interracial families.

Is the Gracie series racist?  No. True, they are leveraging public support to improve their brand, but that’s all about green, not just black and white.  So Sunday, pour out a little salsa for Cheerios’ fan favorite fam.  And General Mills, since it’s working so well to show families stereotype free, maybe you could stop with the cool-ed up Nelly-Bee…or did you mean to play both sides?

A is for Angst

This poor girl…she just wanted to do yoga without being confronted by the very real problems of the privileged, and then BOOM!  she had to look at a black person in her yoga class.  Obviously, the woman attended her yoga class only to direct her rage at poor Jen.  How could Jen tell?  The vibes man, the vibes…

“Because I was directly in front of her, I had no choice but to look straight at her every time my head was upside down (roughly once a minute). I’ve seen people freeze or give up in yoga classes many times, and it’s a sad thing, but as a student there’s nothing you can do about it. At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking about this woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at her, I knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next hour, I watched as her despair turned into resentment and then contempt. I felt it all directed toward me and my body.

If only someone had told her that the woman behind her probably couldn’t give a care about her.  Stereotyping the woman in your yoga class as a rage-filled depressive isn’t enlightenment.  You were all alone in that,  Jen.

Why Can’t We All Get Along?

In 2004 an idealistic young State Senator from Illinois assured us that we were not red states and blue sates, but the united stated of America.  It seems like since that time sates are getting redder and blue-er each year.  Whatever side of the isle you’re on, chances are you  are getting a healthy diet of haterade for your political opposites.

Its hard to evaluate the tone of political discourse and lay blame at anyones feet without looking at the media environment that feeds on and fires up a politically hostile climate.

Decades ago, news reporting relied on–wait for it–reporters and reporting.  Networks maintained large bureaus of news reporters: trained journalist paid to chase down and thoroughly vet news stories for nightly and morning news casts.  A steady erosion of actual journalists coupled with more and more hours of news shows to fill has resulted in a crisis in news.  The result?  shallow reporting, an increased reliance on pundits and “experts” and recycled, regurgitated stories taken from video press releases, company marketing material and tabloid stories.

Imagine you’re a news network exec and you have, oh say, 24 hours to fill without letting your foot off the pedal for viewers and driving them to change the channel.  What to do?  Fluff it up with newstainment–stories with exciting video or salacious stories, but low news value and useless information.  The clutter of viral videos and celeb worship make it more difficult to find out what matters, and encourages a gossip culture that extends beyond Justin Bieber into the political arena in search of the next scandal.

In a race for ratings, political coverage has become increasingly inflammatory, amounting at times to little more than a bad internet forum.   Outrageous factual misrepresentation is rampant with truth falling victim to sensational headlines.  Without fact checking, many viewers are left not only uninformed–but ill informed.  A recent study  found that regular viewers of Fox news are more likely to be less informed than people who do not watch the news at all.

So tonight’s State of the Union speech and the response from no less than 5 republican rebutters is sure to fill tomorrow’s airwaves with plenty of verbal vitriol and heated debate.  In the middle of it, we could really do with some seasoned, reasoned analysis of the very real problems our country faces.  We need facts, not talking points.  We need compassionate consideration of how to make America better for everyone not tweets going for red meat.

While you’re looking to see who’s tearing the country in half, just don’t look across the isle, take a careful look at the messengers of doom. Demand better news from your sources.  Write them letters, tweet their factual finessing, and call them out till we can get the news we need.