Andrew Solomon looks at Honey Maid’s new radical ad campaign and how the company responded to the negative reactions it sparked.
For a long time, prejudice made a certain business sense. You could argue that it was immoral or wrong; others insisted that it was moral and godly. But there was little dispute about the business piece of it. Bill Clinton liked gay people, but he signed the Defense of Marriage Act nonetheless. Karl Rove knew it was smart to put all those anti-gay-marriage initiatives on the ballot. Coors beer could advertise in gay magazines while funding anti-gay interests and keeping any hint of the “non-traditional” out of the ads it ran for general audiences. The regressive side in the so-called culture wars was presumed to include a majority of American consumers; businesses, worried about their image, tended to defer to them.
Now, Honey Maid, that old-fashioned brand of graham crackers, has launched an ad that shows, in the most radical and moving way of any national campaign so far, how much that has changed. It shows a two-dad family, a rocker family, a single dad, an interracial family, a military family. The two-dad household is featured at some length; you cannot be distracted away from it. Most striking is the tagline of the ad: “No matter how things change, what makes us wholesome never will. Honey Maid. Everyday wholesome snacks for every wholesome family. This is wholesome.” The ad is deeply heartwarming—not simply because it shows diversity (which other companies have done) but because it labels these families with the word “wholesome,” which is exactly the kind of word that tends to get claimed by the evangelical right. People have long suggested that the new structures of the American family are “unwholesome” as a way of rationalizing intolerance. The idea of what is “against nature” has been central to messages of prejudice about both interracial relationships and homosexuality.
Honey Maid knew its ad would provoke controversy, and it did. So the company has made a follow-up spot that has been released on social media. “On March 10th, 2014, Honey Maid launched ‘This is wholesome,’ a commercial that celebrates all families,” the online short proclaims. “Some people didn’t agree with our message.” Viewers see close-ups of tweets and e-mails with remarks such as “Horrible, NOT ‘WHOLESOME,’” “DO NOT APPROVE!,” and “Disgusting!!” The title card says, “So we asked two artists to take the negative comments and turn them into something else.” We then see thirty-year-olds Linsey Burritt and Crystal Grover, who collaborate under the name INDO, taking a printout of each hateful comment and rolling it into a tube, then grouping the tubes at one end of a vast, industrial-looking space to create an assemblage that spells out “Love.” The artists appear to walk away, their work done. Then the online ad proclaims, “But the best part was all the positive messages we received. Over ten times as many.” Then we see e-mails with epithets such as “family is family” and “love the Honey Maid ad” and “this story of a beautiful family” and “most beautiful thing.” The entire room fills up with tubes made from these messages. Finally, we are told, “Proving that only one thing really matters when it comes to family … ,” and then we see the word “love” embraced by a roomful of paper tubes. The pacing of the spot is impeccable: the first half turns hatred into love, and the second half provides evidence of love itself. In its first day online, it garnered more than 1.5 million views.
To arrive at the “ten times” statistic, the team used industry-standard “linguistic resource classification,” which is to say that it scanned for the frequency of words such as “excessive,” “miss,” “wrong,” “ridiculous,” “wasted,” “degrading,” “evil,” “crap,” and “ugly” versus “yay,” “best,” “love,” “happy,” “great,” “amazing,” “beautiful,” “like,” “you rock!,” and “heartwarming.” For safety, the artists read every e-mail that they used in their installation to make sure, for example, that an e-mail that said “so not beautiful” didn’t make it into the positive group.
Burritt and Grover were chosen because, according to a spokesman for Droga 5, the ad agency that designed the campaign, “They could blend sustainable practice, innovative design and thoughtful collaboration to help bring the Love Sculpture to life with recycled paper.” Burritt and Grover have occupied an interesting space between advertising and art: Burritt studied graphic design and worked in package production, while Grover studied interior design and worked in store design. Their primary work has been window displays in Chicago. Their history is one of aesthetically striking visual stunts, yet the force of moral conviction radiates from their work for Honey Maid.
Advertising both follows and leads to change. Marketers’ objective is to sell things, and they will seldom be brave enough to jeopardize their own interests, but their own interests appear to be changing. At some quiet moment when “Modern Family” was reaping good ratings, the mentality of corporate America began to change. Cheerios ran an ad last summer that showed an interracial family and received an astonishing amount of vitriol—nearly fifty years after Loving v. Virginia. Some of the responses to its posting on General Mills”s YouTube channel were so odious that General Mills actually disabled the comments. When General Mills did a second ad in the series featuring the same family, it hired screeners to sort through the YouTube comments and remove the most bilious. It debuted during the Super Bowl, in February.
Coca-Cola mounted an ad, also shown during the Super Bowl, that featured people singing “America the Beautiful” in seven languages. It showed many kinds of families—including a quick shot of two dads with their child. It was easy to miss that family if you weren’t looking for it, and the vitriol expressed against Coca-Cola focused on what people believed was the subliminal pro-immigration message, even more than on the gay piece of it. Fox News Radio host Todd Starnes tweeted, “Coca Cola is the official soft drink of illegals crossing the border.” Allen West, the former congressman, wrote that the ad indicated that “we are on the road to perdition.”
It’s striking, and perhaps not entirely coincidental, that the Coca-Cola and Honey Maid ads have appeared in the same season in which Jan Brewer, the governor of Arizona, vetoed S.B. 1062, anti-gay legislation that had passed her state’s legislature. Her veto came partly at the behest of senators who had belatedly understood the bill’s financial consequences. Regard for equal human rights did not drive Brewer; the threat of losing the Super Bowl did. (How did the Super Bowl become the nexus of gay rights?) It turns out that tolerating gay people is good for business, even in Arizona. I’d prefer that people such as I get our rights because we command respect and evince dignity, but if we get them because there’s money in it, that’s fine.
But how crushing that in the same week that Honey Maid has made history, we have the passage, in Mississippi, of S.B. 2681, signed into law Thursday, which takes the same tack as the vetoed Arizona bill but in very careful terms, allowing those with religious rationales to act out their bigotry, and enjoining government from interfering when they do so. I suppose that Mississippi, which doesn’t have an N.F.L. team, didn’t worry about not getting the Super Bowl. The anti-L.G.B.T. Family Research Council has taken credit for the passage of the bill, writing that its efforts
helped to bring along the business community—which, in Arizona, was so deceived by the media and outside leftist groups.… Mississippi companies didn’t have that problem, because the state tuned out the propaganda.
Where Mississippi has gone, other states will likely follow. With no federal jobs or housing protections, with no ENDA, gay people are vulnerable to such oppression. Being good for business gets us only so far. What, then, of Honey Maid? What, then, of making the word love out of all that hatred? It will take more than a pair of talented installation artists to bring about such a transformation on a national scale.
