Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
It’s a curious wrinkle in brand marketing strategy: At a time when stereotyping can get a product cancelled and a company vilified for being insensitive to cultural shifts, it’s still okay to make fun of dads.
The depiction of dads in advertising has become increasingly negative – and sometimes downright snarky. As messaging has shifted toward moms, the main decision-makers on family purchases, dads have not simply been marginalized as uninformed bystanders. They have devolved into bumbling, incompetent boobs.
Their fails are epic. A dad in a current SmartAsset television commercial tries unsuccessfully to remove his own appendix and is wheeled from his house on a stretcher. “What was I thinking?” he asks. His wife watches with a look that says: I married a doofus.
Another SmartAsset dad gets stuck in quick-dry cement after failing to build a backyard swimming pool himself. “Build the pool yourself,” he says. “What could go wrong?” His scornful daughter calls mom for help.
Yet another dad driving his family on a camping trip tunes his Lexus’s radio to a story about a ferocious creature called a “bearsquatch,” terrifying the kids. The mom turns it off and gives dad a steely look.
The dissing of dads is an anomaly that seems to defy the broader societal trend of minimizing hurt feelings in any medium, even in jest.
It’s a depiction that compounds. When two dads put their heads together the poor decision-making is doubled; in a group of dads, the carnage of their collective dopeyness expands exponentially. And it is an equal-opportunity offender. Dads of all races, religions, nationalities and socio-economic stations are fair game.
Marketing and advertising experts say humour still sells, but it’s getting increasingly treacherous to be funny. Just ask the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who was widely criticized for his recent comments on The New Yorker Radio Hour suggesting that political correctness has limited “funny TV” because people worry so much about offending others.
So how come dads are acceptable targets? Toby Lee, a Dallas-based marketing expert who has created brands across several industry sectors – and a dad – suggests dads have become so used to the ridicule, it is like so much water off a duck’s back.
“I never think twice about it,” Mr. Lee said. “But I guess I am a bit surprised there isn’t some movement to rebel against brands that do this as our world is so hypersensitive.”
To Mr. Lee’s point, there are few pro-dad voices out there. One is the columnist and radio host Glenn Sacks, who has made gender-stereotyping in the media and advertising – and dad-bashing, in particular – a focus of his work for years.
He is perhaps best-known for his high-profile campaign against a Verizon television commercial that aired several years ago. In it, a father makes a fool of himself trying to help his young daughter with her homework. The daughter rolls her eyes at his stupidity. The mother orders him to “Leave her alone” and “Go wash the dog.”
In explaining his campaign, which generated thousands of protest letters to Verizon, Mr. Sacks wrote in a post: “The Verizon ad’s message is clear, and it’s a common one on the TV screen – dad is dumb, dad is useless, mom is smarter than dad, hell, even an eight-year-old girl is smarter than dad.”
Despite Mr. Sacks’s advocacy, there are lot of us dads out there who admit that sometimes the shoe fits – despite the exaggeration of the characters, elements of the depictions can be painfully true. As social expectations on us have changed, we continue to be slow to adapt. Every day we find more things we don’t understand and can’t do.
With a sympathetic smile, Christine Barney, founder and CEO of the Miami creative marketing agency RBB Communications, agrees that part of the effectiveness of the dad-ad genre is there may be a little bit of truth behind the stereotype.
From a strategy standpoint, positioning dads as dolts comes down to a simple risk-reward calculation for marketers: humour sells, dads are easy marks because they expect it, there is no concerted pushback, and even many dads admit with a chuckle that behind the over-the-top characterizations of their foibles in advertising, there is some truth to their ineptitude.
So, on Father’s Day, go ahead and laugh when you see those commercials that make dads look like idiots. Some of them are pretty funny, even to us dads. But remember, no matter how hapless marketers make us appear, we are doing our best to make you proud of us.