Bad Ads: Selling Burgers By Insulting Millennials and Women

It’s hard to apologize. As United Airlines recently proved, the first instinct in a crisis is often to try to deflect the blame.

Carl’s Jr. and Hardees fell into that trap when they finally admitted to themselves that they had to rebrand their restaurants. As you may remember, Carl’s Jr. built their brand identity around ads that featured women in bikinis. Although they recently recognized that it was necessary to change, they blamed their past behavior on anybody but themselves. This time the brand is insulting millennials and — borrowing a page from their old playbook — disparaging women.

Blaming the Millennials

Carl’s Jr. is overhauling their image with a campaign that promises – in their own words – to put the emphasis on “food, not boobs.” However, they don’t follow through on their stated strategy of focusing on the food. As they pivot away from years of degrading women, they shift their attention towards insulting millennials.

Here’s the video where they introduce the new branding. Watch how they’re making fun of an entire generation.

Is it possible for Carl’s Jr. to say that their ads will now be about food without actually making ads about how awful they think young people are? They mock millennials for using VR. They mock millennials for DMing. They even mock millennials for wanting brands to be involved in corporate philanthropy. (Seriously. It happens just after the 1:30 minute mark.)

In addition to insulting people based on their age, this tactic also involves a flat out lie:The sexual attitudes of the old Carl’s Jr. ads were definitely immature, but they we not coming from young people. They were coming from people like Andrew Puzder. Until he stepped down in March of 2017, the 66-year old was the CEO of Carl’s Jr. and Hardees for over 16 years. Throughout his tenure, he was a shameless defender of objectifying women.

“I don’t have a problem with our ads," Puzder said in an interview with CNN. “If I did, we wouldn’t run them... I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a beautiful woman in a bikini eating a burger and washing a Bentley or a pick up truck or being in a hot tub. I think there’s probably nothing more American.”

Since the new campaign makes an issue of age, note that Puzder is 38 years older than the actor who’s portraying the vilified millennial and 15 years older than the actor who plays the mature voice of reason.

Blaming The Victim

As you may recall, when they were faced with a PR crisis, United Airlines tried to pin the blame on the assaulted passenger by calling him “disruptive and belligerent.” Carl’s Jr. is doing something similar here. In addition to going after young people, their new pivot also brazenly tries to blame women. Look at how the “Carl Hardee Sr.” character talks to the woman riding the mechanical bull. If the brand truly understood their past mistakes, the character might have told her that she doesn’t have to do that anymore. Instead, he’s telling her to stop it, as if it were her idea to get on the bull in the first place.

After years of exploiting women for their bodies, Carl’s Jr. is now getting puritanical and chastising women for having bodies and bringing them into the office.

That’s not just dumb—it’s dangerous. Consider how this attempt at rebranding fits in with the general shift in how women are mistreated in advertising. For decades, that mistreatment came in the form of objectification justified by the notion that “sex sells.” That style of advertising has been fading away, but unfortunately the crude objectification has been replaced with some outright misogyny. I’m seeing fewer ads that ask me to leer at women, but more ads that ask me to hate them. The new Carl’s Jr. spot is supposed to be less sexist, but it still tries to push the narrative that women in the workplace are distracting the men from working. In the end, is that really an improvement?

The Right Way To Rebrand

There’s a better way to rebrand. For an example of a more effective repositioning, look at GoDaddy. The company had a terrible track record of running ads that objectified women (while doing very little to talk about their actual products and services.) Then they turned it around with a Superbowl spot that demonstrated how they were changing the life of one of their real users.

GoDaddy and Carl’s Jr. had similar branding problems, but GoDaddy’s rebranding had a better execution that projected a more sincere desire to change.