Tide-Downy Ad

Father’s Day is coming up this month and a classic ad from Tide uses the perfect image of fatherhood to get you to buy their product.

This ad from Tide seems innocent enough and, in some ways, not the kind of models we usually see in ads like this one. Typically, we’d expect to see a young blonde white father and blonde white son dressed in matching white t-shirts and cuddled up asleep on white sheets. Yet in this ad, we see a Black father with his Black son dressed in matching white t-shirts and cuddled up on white sheets. Nonetheless the ad is still a shining picture of middle-class comfort and stability.

Although this ad pictures an adult Black man, the target audience seems to be women who love sensitive and loving Black men. We can also gather that this target audience is either middle-class or has aspirations for middle-class living. However, another reading of this ad is that it might be targeting gay men. The ad doesn’t clearly suggest that the voyeur in this ad is a woman and might also be a gay man whose knees would similarly buckle at seeing such a tender moment.

And how exactly does Tide target this audience? By getting women to sigh at this warm and fuzzy picture of a sleeping father and his son. It’s a tried and true technique and we guarantee that very few people will argue against this heartwarming picture. Tide also uses plain folks to get consumers to identify with this image of an average father and his son. Also, in this ad Tide associates itself with general values of caring fatherhood, Black men as supportive fathers and a commitment to loving Black families. This peaceful moment then symbolizes middle-class stability especially through the immaculate white window frame and curtains.

Despite this convincing ad featuring a Black family, it would be hard to argue that Tide is supportive of true racial equality. Tide is a product of Procter & Gamble, a multi-billion dollar company that produces other items like Crest toothpaste, Gillette shavers and Pampers diapers. Procter & Gamble’s headquarters are located in Cincinnati, Ohio – a city that is infamous for its 2001 riots in response to the fatal shooting of a 19-year old Black man by a white cop. The city is about 42 percent Black with 21 percent of the city living in poverty.

However, like many other companies based in a town like Cincinatti, P&G has CEOs on business boards and redevelopment teams that will impact the racial and economic demographics of the city. In the last years, P&G has also led multiple efforts to “diversify” its work force. In 2009, the company reported their work force was only 21 percent people of color.

That is a noble effort, but as the company was leading these campaigns they were also gutting their workforce and their US workers took the brunt of it. Between 1999 and 2001, the company cut a total of 17,400 jobs to decrease overhead expenses and increase profits.

When we put this ad in context of P&G’s priorities of profits and their bottomline, we see that Black families are important to the company as long as they become a life-long consumer base. It’s business. And in business, profits are the real priority.

Leticia Miranda is the Media Research Associate at Media Literacy Project.