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'Flat buns' ad is falling flat
| Sunday, Sep 16 2007 6:05 PM
Last Updated: Sunday, Sep 16 2007 6:08 PM
It's bad enough that I hate Carl's Jr. television ads and the fast-food chain's dripping hamburgers. Now I have to put up with a religious right-wing Web page form letter campaign that is bombarding the Opinion section e-mail at The Californian, as well as most of the nation's newspapers.
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The lame "flat buns" ad has triggered an even lamer protest from the American Family Association (www.afa.net). People are clicking onto the Web page and simple-mindedly hitting "go," which will send an e-mail letter in their name to television and radio stations, and newspapers, protesting the newest Carl's Jr. (and, in some areas, Hardees) television ad.
The letter contends the ad is disgusting and insulting. No argument there. This is the company that featured Paris Hilton in earlier ads washing a Bentley with her body clad in a black bikini. In one version of the commercial for Carl's Jr.'s new "patty melt," a slim, young teacher is dancing on her desk and touching her butt while rappers in the classroom talk about her "flat buns."
The ad provoked more than e-mails from the morality police. Educational groups are outraged that the company is demeaning teachers just to sell burgers.
I don't know why they should be surprised at that. After all, the company has been demeaning women for years just to sell burgers. Carl's Jr. obviously has written off women as a "target market," instead using them simply as targets. OK, fine. That means I'll give my fast-food bucks to Jack. At least he won't sell me beef from an Angus. (Google "Carl's Jr.," "Angus" and "lawsuit" if you don't get the reference.)
Surprise, surprise. Just when we thought nothing could shame Carl's Jr. into its senses, word has arrived that the company is pulling the teacher out of the offensive ad.
"The ad was intended to be humorous and irreverent," Brad Haley, CKE's executive vice president of marketing, said last week. "Since it seemed to be missing the mark with too many people, it justified making a change."
But has that announcement stopped the flow of e-mails from the AFA Web site? No. It's bad enough folks are sending us plagiarized letters. (Hint: if you didn't really write them, don't sign them and pretend you did.) But the "writers" are demanding The Californian, a newspaper, not broadcast a television ad. They are ignoring Web site instructions NOT to send the e-mail to newspapers.
I stopped counting how many of these form letters we received. Like the first one, we didn't print the hundreds that followed. Write your own letter if you want to see it in print.
But we did post one of the letters on the Opinion section's HOT LETTERS blog (http://people.bakersfield.com/home/blogs/hotletters).
Here are some of the responses from our bloggers:
* Since when does The Californian "air" television commercials? Shouldn't the letters be directed at the local network stations? Those people don't appear to be brightest bulbs in the chandelier.
* Consider the average intelligence of the people sending those cookie-cutter letters, and then recognize that, mathematically, more than half of them are even dumber than that. They probably think The Californian is some sort of slow-moving TV channel.
* There's a difference between what these letter "writers" did and plagiarism. I went to the AFA Web site, and they encourage people to send the aforementioned prefabricated letter under their own name. Therefore, it may be dumb, repetitive and unoriginal, but it's not plagiarism.
* As far as stealing someone's letter and sending it for this cause plagiarized, plain and simple. If you haven't got what it takes to respond to something that bothers you in your own words and are just following the "cause" at hand from some national Web site, then your voice carries little or no weight. Speak what is on your own mind, not someone else's Web page.
* What I found to be disgusting and frankly an appeal to people with low intelligence and manners were their ads with people slobbering their food all over. If I want to watch pigs eat, I'll go to a farm.
* The ads showing people slobbering while eating have created the association of "gross" and "Carl's Jr." in my mind.
* I loved the ad. That lil' caboose in that skirt looked really nice.
* Every little boy's dream of the "hot" teacher.
E-mail Dianne Hardisty at dhardisty@bakersfield.com or go to the HOT LETTERS blog at http://people.bakersfield.com/home/blogs/hotletters.