(Aditor’s note: Thanks to both readers of this site for joining in the triumphant return of the good doctor yesterday. We won’t forget your kindness.)
Well the Doc opened up the old mailbag once again and here’s what poured out.
Dear Dr. Ads,
There I was, just minding my own business and scrolling through Twitter when I came across this.
The Hill’s Judy Kurtz reported that “candy is about to get more ‘inclusive,’ with the maker of M&M’s announcing its famed characters are getting modern makeovers and will have more ‘nuanced personalities.’”
For example:
The green M&M, previously seen in ads posing seductively and strutting her stuff in white go-go boots, will now sport a pair of sneakers. A description for the green candy on the M&M’s website says she enjoys “being a hypewoman for my friends.”
A hypewoman? What the hell even is that? Help me out here, Doc.
– Candy Crushed
Dear Crushed,
In the past, the Doc’s efforts to tackle delicate subjects like this one have tended to go over like the metric system. So let’s leave it to the Double Xers.
Danielle Cohen at The Cut.
Let the M&M’s Be Hot and Mean
Have you ever gazed at a piece of chocolate and asked yourself, What if this candy were … progressive? Can’t say I have, but lucky for me, somebody thought to do just that. Mars has rolled out new versions of famed M&M’s characters to reflect what the company sees as a “more dynamic, progressive world” and what I see as a very rude corporate rebrand nobody asked for.
Claire Carusillo at Gawker (headline: They Made the Green M&M a Dumpy Slut).
[Yesterday], the Mars Wrigley company rolled out a sterile, bone-dry rebrand of those sentient, sexy, candy-shelled roly-polys we like to call M&Ms. Notably, the hot green one is no longer wearing go-go boots, and the brown one has a lower heel. Anton Vincent, the president of Mars Wrigley North America told CNN that tamping down the sexuality of our most beloved screen sirens by giving them more sensible footwear is “a subtle cue, but it’s a cue nonetheless” that M&Ms are feminism, that they are geopolitics, that they are egalitarianism, and that they are corporate ladder climbing.
EJ Dickson at Rolling Stone (headline: Let the Green M&M Be a Nasty Little Slut).
The recent push to rebrand corporate logos to be more inclusive has, for the most part, been a good thing. Making Barbie more body-positive? Great. Renaming Aunt Jemima syrup? About damn time. Yet in brands’ fervent quest to capture youth audiences and capture the woke zeitgeist, they may be going just a little bit too far. Case in point: the slut-shaming of the green M&M.
‘Nuf said.