Gus Carlson is a US-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
It's a strange twist in brand marketing strategy: In an age when stereotyping gets products canceled and companies are accused of being insensitive to cultural change, it's still okay to poke fun at dads.
Portrayals of fathers in advertising have become increasingly negative, and sometimes outright spiteful. As messaging shifts to mothers as the primary decision makers in the family's purchases, fathers are no longer merely marginalized as ignorant bystanders but reduced to bumbling, incompetent idiots.
Their failures are epic. In a current TV commercial for SmartAsset, a father tries and fails to remove his own appendix and is carried out of the house on a stretcher. “What were you thinking?” the father asks, while his wife looks on with a look that says, “I married an idiot.”
Another SmartAsset dad tries to build his own backyard pool but ends up stuck in quick-drying cement: “I can just build it myself, what's the problem?” the dad says. The daughter disdainfully asks her mother for help.
Another father scares his kids on a camping trip by tuned the radio in his Lexus to a tale of a vicious creature called “Bearsquatch,” while their mother turns off the radio and gives him a cold look.
Insulting a father, even in jest, is an aberration that goes against the overall societal tendency to minimize hurt feelings in any medium.
It's an exacerbating portrait: When two dads put their heads together, the poor decisions are multiplied twice. In a group of dads, the tragedy of collective stupidity is exponentially magnified. And it's an equal opportunity crime: fathers of every race, religion, nationality, and socioeconomic status are targeted.
Marketing and advertising experts say humor still sells, but it's becoming increasingly dangerous to be funny. Just ask comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who was widely criticized recently on The New Yorker Radio Hour for suggesting that political correctness is limiting “funny TV” because people are too concerned about offending others.
So why are dads such an easy target? Toby Lee, a Dallas-based marketing professional who has launched brands across multiple industry sectors, says dads are so used to being ridiculed that they don't think anything of it.
“I don't think twice about it,” Lee says, “but I think our world has become so hypersensitive that I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a movement to push back against brands that do this kind of thing.”
As Lee points out, there are few voices out there defending fathers, including Glenn Sachs, a columnist and radio host who has long focused his work on gender stereotypes in the media and advertising, particularly father-bashing.
He is perhaps best known for his extensive campaign against a Verizon TV commercial that aired a few years ago in which a father is humiliated when he tries to help his young daughter with her homework. The daughter is astounded by her father's stupidity, and the mother commands him to “leave her alone” and “go wash the dog.”
Describing his campaign, which has resulted in thousands of letters of protest to Verizon, Sachs wrote in a post, “The message of Verizon's ads is clear and is commonly seen on our television screens: Dads are stupid, Dads are useless, Moms are smarter than Dads, even 8 year old girls are smarter than Dads.”
Despite Sachs' assertions, many of us dads would admit that this is true at times. Though the characters are exaggerated, some of the descriptions can be painfully true. Society's expectations of us are changing, but we remain slow to adapt. Every day, there are more and more things we don't understand or can't do.
Kristin Barney, founder and CEO of Miami-based creative marketing firm RBB Communications, agrees with a sympathetic smile that one reason the dad-ad genre is so effective is that there may be a grain of truth behind the stereotypes.
From a strategic standpoint, positioning dads as idiots is a simple risk-reward calculation for marketers: Humor sells, dads are easily fooled because they expect it, there's no coordinated backlash, and even many dads laugh and admit that there's some truth to fatherly ineptitude behind ads' exaggerated portrayals of fatherly foibles.
So this Father's Day, laugh at all the commercials that make fun of dads — some of them are pretty funny, even for dads — but remember, we're trying our best to make you proud, no matter how unfortunate marketers make us look.
