And other questionable, perhaps racist, marketing decisions.
DELICIOUSLY OFFENSIVE
In 2004 Dairy Queen wanted a share of the hundreds of millions of dollars Starbucks was making with its blended, frozen Frappuccino coffee drinks. So Dairy Queen came out with its own version: coffee mixed with chocolate, ice cream, and milk. To market the drink’s combination of milk and coffee, they called it the MooLatte. An outcry went up almost immediately: The name of the product, which combined a brown thing with a white thing, was far too similar to an outdated, offensive word for a person of mixed black and white heritage: mulatto. Dairy Queen denied that there’s any connection, and the MooLatte is still on the menu.
The German company TrekStor had some success with their MP3 player, the i.Beat. But in 2007, they released a new version of the device with a smooth black finish and an unfortunate name: the “i.Beat Blaxx.” After a firestorm of criticism, the company renamed it “TrekStor Blaxx.”
In 1996 Mattel contracted with Nabisco to make an Oreo-cookie-themed Barbie doll. The toy came dressed in blue-and-white clothing printed with little pictures of Oreos. At first, Mattel received a few complaints that the toy promoted junk food, but the protest letters flooded in after they released an African-American version of the doll. Mattel apparently wasn’t aware that “oreo” was a racial epithet leveled by black people at other black people who were accused of acting “too white”—like an Oreo cookie, black on the outside, but white on the inside. Mattel quickly took the toy off the market, and today African-American Oreo Barbies are a collector’s item.
Americans watch more than 250 billion hours of TV a year—more than 28 million years’ worth.