…ad and Other Ads Like It

After seeing the movie “The Big Black Ass” a few weeks ago, I can’t help but compare the movie to the Coppertone ad campaign of decades past. In the movie, Michael Douglas plays an affluent black man who owns his own car company. Throughout the movie, he’s shown driving around in high style, pulling in the rich and famous. One scene has him having lunch with some Hollywood stars, most of them white. It’s a glorious time for a black man in America to be pampered by the very people he is striving to keep in poverty.

I wonder how much times similar ads have inspired successful black Americans to pull down their socks. And pull up their pants. Since the ads like the one above have been airing. More blacks are starting to wake up to the fact that they have a lot of money to do good things in life.

Many times during the ads, you’ll notice some great cars driving by. And they have the sign on the window letting you know they have a big black ass. These black cars and these ads don’t necessarily make sense unless you understand that it’s not just about the car. There are many other things going on with this particular black American family in the movie.

If you are going to compare the movie to the Coppertone ads of the past, you need to realize that they are doing it to attract the masses to their cars. The movies’ main characters are a great example of what it means to have a big black ass. We see Michael Douglas repeatedly pampering a large, highly considered, wealthy black woman. We see his family repeatedly trying to save their home and to get the black man on television to show them love.

These are all things we’ve seen before in ads like these. But it appears that the advertising industry finally understands that some of the things they are doing won’t work for everybody.