“Milk’s favorite cookie” wants you to know it’s OK to be gay—again.
I’m sure you’ve wondered, as you’ve dipped your delicious, cream-filled cookie (Double Stuf, please!) into a nice, cold glass of milk: What is Oreo’s policy about coming out?
Wonder no more. Not even a Birthday Cake Oreo—or my kids’ favorite, the Fudge Covered Oreo—is safe from woke politics.
On Monday, Oreo’s parent company Nabisco released a short film detailing a young Asian man’s experience coming out as gay.
In the two-and-a-half-minute film, the boy nervously reads a note to his immediate family, and it becomes apparent he is practicing to come out as gay to his extended family, who are soon to visit. The scene is tense. The doorbell rings, a family member grabs an Oreo before answering it. A handwritten note from the mother is visible on the boy’s speech.
“She might be my mother, but you are my son,” the note reads. The film ends on a high note as presumably the boy comes out as gay and all happily get a sugar high from Oreos afterward.
“Coming out doesn’t happen just once. It’s a journey that needs love and courage every step of the way,” Oreo tweeted along with the video. “Share our new film and let someone know you’re their #LifelongAlly.”
As a brand, Oreo can, of course, do whatever it wants. If it wants to hire renowned director Alice Wu to make a short film on “coming out” and Oreos, by all means.
But that doesn’t exclude the rest of us from some marketing observations.
If you’d told me 20 years ago that in the year 2022 we would not yet have flying cars but we’d have cookie brands endorsing the LGBT lifestyle through artistic short films posted on social media, I’d have laughed out loud.
Woke politics have consumed so much of life that even household brand names feel the need to make a show of their outward support.
I’m just curious: Was there pressure from the LGBT community to do this? Was a gay person hesitant to eat an Oreo because he didn’t know Nabisco’s position? Chances are slim to none.
It’s easy to make light of—because it’s a cookie, for goodness sake—but we’re seeing a surge in large corporations and popular brands diving head first into woke marketing.
You know the first rule of business: Follow the money. As such, we endeavor to understand what that means. Oreo didn’t invest in a film like this for nothing.
If you think a commercial like this sounds commonplace or maybe just benign, a shift in characters might help you come to a different conclusion.
Imagine Oreo doing a commercial on a Chinese man coming out as Christian to his family in China. Christians are heavily persecuted in Communist China, but Christianity is also growing rapidly, due to that persecution. However, Oreo would never communicate such an inspirational truth.
Commercials like Oreo’s manage to communicate this absurdity: Despite the LGBT community’s constant appeals for media attention and for equality, it not only has both, but it proves a much more problematic point; namely, only left-wing politics, particularly about gender identity or sexual orientation, command the attention of household brands.
Anything else would be too basic, too boring, too center-right, or too religious.
Increasingly, corporate America has been stepping in to support woke social justice causes. Political correctness has captured big businesses, even brands previously just associated with a sugar high, theme parks like Disney World, or children’s programming, like that of Nickelodeon. That brand just tweeted about a transgender kid for the so-called Transgender Day of Visibility, highlighting a child’s gender dysphoria for the world.
LGBT activists complain about being caught in the middle of the culture war, even as they fuel the controversy at every turn, even rendering cookies like Oreos woke.
*story by The Daily Signal
