Gillette Ad

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After watching and reviewing this interesting advertisement released by Gillette multiple times, it has become clear to me as to why men all over the world are taking offence to this. When Gillette first released the advertisement, they had positive intentions at heart but did not think of what possibly could go wrong. Gillette had one interpretation of the message they were trying to get through to their audience and in the process of communicating there was a massive misunderstanding. Men from a variety of cultures took an extreme amount of offence to this. I believe there are different things in the advertisement that stood out of different men, each man had his own motive for disliking the ad. The advertisement stretched its message too far outside the boundaries of its cultural context according to some males expressing their thoughts in the comment section of the video. Men are saying that Gillette is promoting the wrong images for young boys to follow. In the advertisement, there is a scene where a father runs to stop a group of boys from bullying another young boy which would naturally be seen as doing a good deed, but comments suggested otherwise. A man commented saying he tried to help a girl being assaulted by a group of men and ended up in the hospital with 17 stab wounds. Other men say the ad as sexist as they had a row of men standing in front of barbeques repeating the words, "Boys will be boys". The man who commented then said, "Can you imagine an ad presenting an endless row of women in front of an endless row of ovens, sandwiches or laundry?". One comment states "Of the 42 males shown engaging in "negative" behaviour, 41 are white 1 black. Of the 7 males shown engaging in "positive" behaviour, 5 are black 2 white. Just imagine that the other way around.". The man who commented does have a valid point in my opinion. I believe this man is from the United States where a person's racial status is still taken into consideration when something goes wrong. One in every 65, (or 1.5%) deaths of a black man in the US is a killing by police, (The Guardian). The comment ends by saying imagine if the numbers were reversed, telling us to imagine if the advertisement showed a majority of black males doing the wrong thing and then a majority of white males doing the right thing. Would as many Americans be upset about the commercial then?
The advertisers used the persuasive technique of fear to get inside their audiences head and then showed the technique of bandwagon as a way out. 

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