Kraft Cancels Their 'Send Noods' Campaign When Angry Moms Complain it Sexualizes Mac & Cheese
Source - Kraft Heinz's jokey marketing campaign encouraging people to "send noods" quickly descended into a hellfire after angry moms ravaged their Instagram posts, saying the company "sexualized mac 'n' cheese" and was being "predatory" toward children. ...
On Tuesday, the company playfully announced its #SendNoods campaign with a video featuring former Saturday Night Live actor Vanessa Bayer.
Kraft and Bayer play up the pun repeatedly in the video. "In these strange times, people are in need of extra comfort. That's why it's always a nice gesture to send noods," she says. "To be clear, I'm not advocating you send nudes to anyone. ... Send noods, not nudes."
Some customers did not find the bit funny, saying it was wildly "inappropriate" because Kraft was a "family company." Many threatened to take their business to Annie's, another purveyor of mac 'n' cheese.
"This is not okay. Don’t you realize that a huge portion of the people who actually eat your mac n’ cheese are children?!" one commenter wrote. "Please delete this!! Unacceptable!"
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When I wake up every day, part of me feels like Brooks when he got out of Shawshank, seeing what the world has become and trying to make sense of it. "The world went and got itself i to be so damn sensitive. ... I don't like it here. ... I'm tired of being afraid of what I can say." Or what everyone is allowed to joke about.
If there's one thing Teenage Jerry never could never had anticipated the culture being like when he became Old Balls Jerry, it's this. Its absolute inability to take a joke. Especially a joke that any amount of sexual connotations to it.
Even when I was a kid, you could see how things were changing and extrapolate ahead and imagine how they'd be today. Positive changes. Like women covering sports that used to be off limits to them. African Americans being portrayed as professionals on TV shows instead of the way you see them always as railroad porters and domestic help in old black and white Turner Classic Movies. Native Americans not always being blood thirsty savages like you find in old cowboy movies. I've mentioned this before, but "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is a movie so beloved they write songs about it being the basis for relationships. And I defy anyone to actually sit through it, because they've got Mickey Rooney playing a brutal Asian stereotype with slant eyes behind his thick glasses and enormous buck teeth speaking pigeon English. For laughs. It's insane how things used to be and change, in these cases, is good.
But we're now drawing the line at vaguely sexual puns in ads? We can't even joke about nudity any more? Not even implied nudity? Even though there is nothing more innately funny than sex and nudity? I just never, ever saw this coming.
I grew up in a post-"Mad Men" time where it was well established that sex sells. Mild sexuality was being used for a generation by the time I started misspending my youth watching TV all day. I mean, check out this commercial that ran during the Apollo moon landing, for crying out loud. It's for paper, of all goddamned things.
Or this one, for the Polaroid camera that they so wanted people to associate with taking nude photos without having to have them developed that they up and called the damned thing "The Swinger."
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Remember when this was how they got American males to stay in their seats during Super Bowl time outs?
And now it 2020, we've got such a stick up our collective ass, that the mere use of a double entendre about a thing that millions of consenting adults do - send nudes to each other - can't be used to sell carbs slathered in orange dairy fat. Even if you specifically say not to send nudes. Why? Because a few deranged, humorless Karens are so determined to be outraged about something, they say you're trying to corrupt America's youth.
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Why don't we just put the culture out of its misery and skip ahead to the part where we just outlaw humor. It's heading that way as it is. Why prolong the agony another day?