Don't Like - Purported Shifts In Brand Values
The most interesting ad to me in this year’s Super Bowl is Carl’s Jr’s new ad starring Alix Earle. It’s not a particularly good or clever ad. It surely won’t win any awards at Cannes, The One Show, D&AD, or The Clios, unless they create a “Hot Girls eating burgers” category, in which case it’ll take the Grand Prix. What’s interesting about this otherwise boring ad is that it exists at all. It marks a distinct return for Carl’s Jr. to the genre of advertising that once got them in trouble in the first place. There are some brands that make fabulous, fun, creative ads. Carl’s Jr. wasn’t one of them.1 Carl’s Jr. was “famous,” as advertising executives like to say, for making ads with hot, scantily clad women eating their burgers.2 These ads were prototypical male gaze ads, the kind of that would have made the Swedish Bikini Team proud. The most famous of them starred Paris Hilton:
This ad was quite controversial when it came out. Paris Hilton washing a Bentley in a revealing swimsuit while eating a juicy cheeseburger didn’t sit that well with many, many people. The concept of the burger being “spicy” and using her tagline of “That’s hot” didn’t connect. However, Carl’s Jr. remained defiant over the ad, including telling a watchdog group to “get a life.” The only possible reason for this is that the ads must have sold some burgers, probably in the same way that pin up posters have helped sell Snap On Tools. After Paris Hilton, Carl’s Jr. continued the theme of the campaign by working with other models like Kate Upton, Kim Kardashian, Emily Ratajkowski, Sara Jean Underwood, Hannah Ferguson, Heidi Klum, and Charlotte McKinney to make their own raunchy burger ads.
Again, these are not exactly sophisticated ads. You can practically hear the assuredly all-male creative team behind these ads doing their best middle school laughs at what they were creating. As dumb as these ads are, they still had to go through rounds and rounds of creative review. At some point people were having entirely ridiculous yet earnest conversations about the directions of these ads. This is especially true because the Charlotte McKinney “Au Naturel” ad was created by an agency called 72andSunny, who at the time were considered one of the best advertising agencies in the world (and they still are). Anyway, as you might expect, these ads were widely criticized when they were released. However, it wasn’t until #MeToo that these ads left a truly sour taste in the mouths of American consumers, finally humbling Carl’s Jr. So what did they do? They corrected course in order to improve sales by making a 3:17 long “brand film” called “Carl Sr. Returns,” in which a Good-Guy-Mature-Man™️ comes back to Carl’s Jr. HQ to make things right after a long time away. Take a look:
It’s a totally insane piece of communication made for a super niche target audience: the C-Suite of Carl’s Jr. Instead of just changing course and making hamburger ads that didn’t involve women in bikinis, they made a grand gesture that no doubt cost them an obscene amount of money. It’s a classic case of advertisers advertising to themselves. But that investment clearly must have felt worth it because they wanted people to know that they had changed. This was meant to be a big about face for the brand. Although, as I recall, the result was mostly a dud. This may have been best for Carl’s Jr. because it also didn’t get the blowback that Gillette’s “The Best Men Can Be” campaign received. As you might recall, that was Gillette’s extremely forced attempt to tackle “toxic masculinity,” which no one had asked for. Shortly thereafter, Gillette switched its marketing back to their normal ads. Carl’s Jr. also changed course, but they chose to go the product porn route making ads comprising of heroic shots their burgers with some VO. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these ads haven’t broken through in culture the way Carl’s Jr. executives would have liked. So now, just eight short years after the return of Carl Hardee Sr., it appears Carl’s Jr. is so back and using hot babes to sell their burgers.
Again, the ad itself starring Alix Earle isn’t that interesting. It’s a straightforward sell to try “The Hangover Burger” for free (with app download) the day after pigging out for four quarters and a halftime show. It isn’t even particularly sexy or raunchy by Carl’s Jr.’s own previous standards. What is interesting, though, is its timing, and knowing the process it took to get the ad made. Make no mistake, this ad went through many rounds of approvals and careful planning. Super Bowl ads don’t get made on accident and they don’t get made quickly either. Typically, brainstorming for Super Bowl ads starts all the way back in May. A lot has happened since then and in some ways this ad feels like an odd cultural litmus test. Admittedly, anyone pretending that society ever stopped being into sexy women needs to get their head checked. But after a few years of boob discourse courtesy of Sydney Sweeney and the rise of Boom Boom aesthetics, this ad feels telling.
It makes you wonder what the boardroom conversations were like to sell it through. What happened to the bold declaration of the new brand values with Carl Sr? Would this ad have run if Trump hadn’t won the presidency? Is this a naked attempt to match the cultural “vibe shift?” Or is it simply a return to what used to work for their brand? In many ways, this ad feels like the kind of thing society was supposed to have “moved beyond.” Brands have spent the last decade proudly declaring that they’d found strong, moral values around building strong communities for a bolder tomorrow or whatever. Those hollow words are nothing more than a cynical sales pitch. That’s why what this ad really reveals is that the most important value for 99% of brands is to sell product.3 Now, we’ll have to see if it works.
Ok this isn’t entirely true. I have a soft spot for their “Don’t bother me, I’m eating” campaign, which featured everyday seeming people enjoying their burgers.
This point is debatable as the burgers often appeared to be computer generated.
Two brands that seem to actually have values are Patagonia and Ben & Jerrys.