Still thinking about the Super Bowl Pepsi advertisement …
January 28th, 2008Now Pepsi has issued a video about the making of “Bob’s House,” the soundfree Super Bowl commercial about the two deaf guys on a dark night who figure out where their friend lives by honking their horn until all the other neighbors turn on their porch lights. (They can tell which house is Bob’s because the porch light stays off.) The commercial has been hailed as “ground-breaking” by the National Association for the Deaf because it features American Sign Language.
Funny, right? And yet one wonders: isn’t the ad also presenting its characters as rude, self-centered, disruptive troublemakers? Is this the way that people with hearing impairments want to be portrayed? Or is it the price they have to pay to get a berth on primetime TV? Just had to ask …
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January 28th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Good point about how deaf people are presented. I got side-tracked on Pepsi posting their “pat on the back” video and didn’t think about this side of it. Seriously, this too is a bad thing about the presentation in the advertisement. [See Larry's insightful post at Disabilitynation.net.]
February 8th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
The two guys in the car really are deaf and work for Pepsi, and the commercial is a depiction of a long-running joke in the deaf community. I did not think of the guys as trouble makers, only resourceful. I think Pepsi ought to be applauded not only for producing a commercial by, with and for deaf people, but also for breaking the national trends and employing them. Perhaps, the commercial will open the eyes of other big corporations to just how valuable employees with disabilities can be.