Dairy Queen’s Creepy Advertisement

My friend Marc Leibson sent me an email with a request to go to a petition site and sign up against an advertisement for Dairy Queen. Now if this were the usual crap about sex and violence I would not be signing, unless it were a demand for more sex and violence. Because that’s the stuff of great literature, as we all know.

But this is something else entirely. Hide the kids and check it out right here on this page. Just having it here, courtesy of YouTube’s embedding technology, makes me feel dirty. I basically agree with my friend’s take on the thing, expressed eloquently on the petition page, which you should go to right now and sign if you also agree.

I would like to have your comments about this, but don’t bother if you think we are stifling free speech, because you wont be telling me anything I don’t already know: that there are plenty of people who have no idea what that phrase means.

If I were a bigwig at Dairy Queen I would be looking for any executives who knew about this and approved it or let it get approved, and I would be getting rid of them. And I would issue standing orders that the advertising agency involved would be off our list forever. Adults with this kind of bad judgment can not be reeducated through sensitivity training. If you let them remain in your organization you are nurturing a time bomb that will eventually go off, and leave you with a new project: repairing the formerly wholesome image of your company, over years and at great expense. But maybe that’s why I don’t often get calls asking me to be the new CEO.