Frito Lay’s Senior Moment

Trying to be funny and winding up with something simply ignorant, stupid, and grotesque is not an outcome I would wish on anyone.  And yet, that is what happened to BBDO Worldwide, the advertising agency that created the Frito-Lay “Senior Moment” commercial aired on this year’s Super Bowl broadcast.

The current uproar about the Super Bowl centers on a tasteless half-time show (which I had the good sense not to watch) but I suggest some indignation should be saved for this commercial.

In case you missed it, the 30-second ad shows an old man and an old woman, presumably a couple, vying with one another to reach a bag of potato chips that had fallen on the floor. As the woman lurches toward the prize, the man reaches out, catches her ankle with his cane, and sends her sprawling.

As he totters by her, he presses his cane into her back to keep her down. When he captures the package, he looks back at her triumphantly.  With a gloating grin, however, she looks up at him and holds up a full set of his false teeth.

Does this seem funny to you? A group of MBA students at Washington University in St. Louis voted it the third best among this year’s Super Bowl commercials. This marked the fourth consecutive year in which the students held the competition, after evaluating the ads with faculty members and visiting advertising agency pros.

“Who would have thought ole grandpa had such spunk? Could you ever imagine a  gramma as feisty as she?  What a hoot to see these old codgers ready to do violence to one another for potato chips!” (Such may have been the level of critical response to the ad from these future business leaders of America.)

It escaped them entirely that the ad might have conveyed an image of elderly people that is not only unflattering but full of prejudice. The students are supposed to be whetting their critical intelligence, but instead they accepted as funny a commercial that trades on stereotypes.

Two Harvard undergraduates of my acquaintance, Jackie O’Brien and Stephanie Hurder, also found the ad innocent: “I do not think the ad made fun of the elderly in a harmful way,” says Jackie. Stephanie adds: “Perhaps the reason I found the ad entertaining was that it portrayed old people being feisty, when it’s usually assumed that old people are docile and incapable of physical conflict.”

In stressing humor, they have a point. But I wonder in this instance if they are not missing something. There may be a generational difference at work here. Perhaps you have to be closer to my age to feel offended by ads like this one. And maybe you also need a more seasoned view of American culture and the advertising industry that reflects our values.

I side with longtime ad watcher John Carroll, currently executive producer of “Greater Boston” on WGBH-TV, who labels the ad as the “cheapest, lamest, grasp at a laugh.”

Another friend, Robert Katz, a long-time advertising executive, finds this ad to be in “very poor taste.” My age peer Emerson Stamps regrets “an acting out of the violence of society” while Donna Svrluga says simply: “I was appalled.”

The views of the students at Washington University and at Harvard would be welcomed by the people at Frito-Lay in Dallas. I spoke to the company’s director of public relations, Charles Nicolas, who told me the ad has proved so popular in other countries that Frito-Lay decided to present it on the Super Bowl broadcast. He admits, however, that they have received negative feedback as well as positive.

Nicolas confesses not knowing how to react to the criticism. “It was an attempt at humor,” he says, and adds. “We didn’t mean to offend anyone.” Fortunately, the company has no plans to show it again in this country but it is currently airing it in Mexico and eight other countries.

Maybe they would have profited, as I did, from the work of the “Media Watch,” a committee of the Gray Panthers that used to monitor television programs and commercials for evidence of mistaken views of elders.

Members of this group raised my own consciousness in the 1970s about the often subtle stereotypes of older people that were more common then. Not without a certain militancy, the Panthers would go after the producers of the ads and growl at the networks that showed them.

You may wonder if I am making to big a deal out of this.  After all, it was just an ad. What difference does it make except to sell more potato chips?

But ageism, like racism and sexism, exerts harmful outcomes on society. People lose their jobs because of it. Older Americans get shortchanged in quality health care because of ageist attitudes. And many people are made to feel worthless because growing older is regarded in so many quarters as the road to irrelevance.

The kind of prejudice behind the “Senior Moment” ad (this title itself I find patronizing) is subtle and covered over by an attempt at humor. That does not make it any less objectionable.

Richard Griffin