Monday, September 21, 2009

Sabra Hummus Commercial: Unconscious Metaphor for the State

For anyone who has ever lived in Israel, been to Israel or heard of Israel you may have also heard of hummus. And you may know that a Sabra is a cactus, not only the national plant of the land of milk of honey but also an affectionate slang term for an Israeli: prickly on the outside, soft on the inside, sort of like a lot of non-American cultures, (and it's true, I dated a sabra).
Anyway, for non-homemade Sabra hummus (or kha-moose as some affected say) is yummy, it's good, I buy it all the time. But what/who ad genius thought that it would be a good idea to call Sabra a "Mediterranean vacation", to de-Jewify it and thus make it accessible and friendly to all (okay, dig, I get marketing-also I get that it is a Middle Eastern food not exclusive to faith but it's called Sabra) and then feature a middle-aged maybe half "ethnic" couple sitting down to relax to said "Meditteranean vacation" only to be interrupted by a :
bomb? SCUD missile? stone through the window?
The fact is, things aren't quite all chill in the Middle East, and to break out an ethnic food and accompany it with a loud booming crash through the window (that incidentally sometimes happens in the homeland) is a little weird, creepy, and bizarre for advertising. But, (spoiler alert), don't worry, it's just their teenaged son partying because he thought his parents were in the"Mediterranean".
See the commercial here.

Also, Happy New Year!
AP

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hahahahah!!! So weird

Anonymous said...

umm.. the racial paranoia of this article reminds me of martin lawrence's character in Boomerang.
I think this observation is a freudian slippery slope in the search for latent content in life.. or just advertising.

prickly on the hindsight, i admit my critique is... but
I guess alls fair in fighting that cognitive dissonance weighing down on all of 'us' in the free commericial world..

Anonymous said...

I would have to agree with the racial paranoia statement. It's a bit of a stretch to think this is anti-Israel even a little bit.