Matchbox's controversial "Young Warriors" campaign
Young Warriors is a new ad campaign for Mattel Asia Pacific's Matchbox brand. Created by Ogilvy & Mather Singapore, it depicts children in military scenes. Mother Jones' Dave Gilson suggests that the campaign is the sequel to last year's award-winning Young Drivers campaign for Matchbox by Ogilvy & Mather Frankfurt.
the latest
latest episodes
Somebody should immediately hack these, affixing the Matchbox logo to pictures of actual child soldiers: not these McCauley Culkin clonebots. Brand warfare, anyone?
Reminds me of this campaign, by Toronto ad agency John St., for War Child Canada:
http://www.johnst.com/warchild/
Like the kids that play with little matchbox planes aren't visualizing themselves in the cockpit exactly how the picture depicts.
I don't get it. The kids look really bored. Are they suggesting that Matchbox toys are for kids who find flying an armed jet really dull? Does this sort of advertising work?
The fact that these kids look bored as hell makes me feel uncomfortable. Not in a bad way but it just gives the ad a slight edge in making it more visually compelling.
I played with fighter planes and spaceships when I was a kid. This is just a visual representation of what goes on in a kid's head while playing with the toys.
I honestly get taken aback by how readily parents and watchdog groups get offended. Don't like? Don't buy.
Tdawwg,
1. http://i30.tinypic.com/fd7f42.jpg
2. http://i26.tinypic.com/29xdsuc.jpg
3. http://i25.tinypic.com/aca79y.jpg
I think the ads are pretty clever. Hey, isn't it kind of odd that Matchbox and Hot Wheels are both owned by Mattel? Maybe someone should file some kind of anti-trust action against them for cornering the 1/64 scale die cast toy car market.
Maybe it is controversial because of the number of real child soldiers around the world? A popular advertisement campaign for military toys would be a great way of supplanting the idea of military service in children.
Damn Romantic age ruined childhood for everybody! Before the "Romance" children where just small adults. There is nothing like seeing a child in tiny chainmail with a waster in his hands.
People need to get over themselves. When I was a little kid I ran around pretend doing all sorts of things that would make any hyper PC lefty child physiologist weep. If I wasn't out slaughtering thousands of bad guys with a gun, I was doing with with a phaser, sword, or or bow and arrow. Even my mothers absolute instance on keep any toy away from me that looked even remotely violent did nothing. Can't have a toy gun? I know I had all manner of sticks of various lengths and shape that could simulate anything from a sword, to a space ship, to a rifle.
I am pretty sure that war fantasies are hardwired into the heads of little boys. The only difference is that in this day and age instead of running around pretending to slaughter that opposing tribe with a fake spear, you get to use a pretend F-16. Let kids be kids.
If there is anything 'wrong' it is simply the advertising to children. Advertising to children is perhaps rather sleazy, but the fact that the advertisement is a kids fantasy of zipping around in an airplane blowing shit up? Eh, perfectly fine, normal, and healthy. I don't see evidence that the age of neurotic parenting as done anything other than leave the youth slightly crazier than the previous generation.
That's not a bored face. It's a cool face.
A brown 1988 Chevy Caprice Classic is a military vehicle now?
(Or whatever that is. Oldsmobile?)
I call fake. Or rather, real. That's an actual cockpit image of a kid who stole an F-16, and the air force didn't realize it until the chloroformed real pilot woke up. It got out on the internet, and in order to avoid embarrassment they had to come up with a cover story, and used their connections at Matchbox.
Of course, we should look at cultural context here.
I don't know where this ran, but in Singapore military service is mandatory for all males. So there's no question about whether you're encouraging boys to glorify the military or whatever. It's a given. You will drive tanks, shoot guns, etc. It's what you WILL learn to do or you'll go to jail.
Not everyone gets to fly F-16s but you see them doing training missions on a more or less daily basis if you live/work on the east side of the island.
Children being forced into armed conflicts is terrible. But I don't think that this advertising is contributing to it.
Frankly, I think that this is a great campaign, it shows the immersion that you see when young kids play, and the best bit is the kids' facial expressions. There's something really fun about when kids take their games really seriously.
And that's coming from a pacifist who considers eating meat too violent for him.
Controversial? The angst is almost perceptible.
I count what, three or four people that have expressed "outrage" at this ad campaign...
This campaign will likely resonate with parents who remember childhood fantasies of being at the controls of their favorite toy (plane, car, tank, whatever), and suprise, suprise, it offends folks who would likley never consider buying a toy tank or fighter plane for their kids. I don't think this campaign will cost them any potential customers, I think it will increase market share among likely buyers.
Did you notice how antiseptic the images are? Not one disemboweled soldier, no blood, no opposing force, just a child tranported into their fantasy.
I'd love to see Mother Jones' take on this item, a Hello Kitty AR-15
this is wrong. In order for children to understand (and be "immunized") they would have to have their innocence taken. It is no different than the pornography of little girls in full make-up and stilettos at "beauty pageants".
Some argue childhood as we understand it is a recent invention. Perhaps so, so was sanitation. If children - among themselves - play war, that is one thing. I instinctively don't like this, and the images of real child soldiers above is why.
I find it rather impressive that a kid would be able to fly that thing, considering it doesn't have a vertical stabilizer.
What I find most perplexing is that despite the fact that the ads are for an Asian market and made in Singapore, none of the kids look Asian (I would have thought that would have been the controversy).
And I agree that the kids look really bored. When my nephew is engrossed in some fantasy war/adventure/drama, his brow is furrowed as heck.
Nice, Arkizzle, those are beautiful!
My objection comes, not from a culture acclimating its kids to war--all cultures have kids, all cultures have war--but in the sterilized, packaged, pornographic way the ads above do it: Takuan's analogy to kiddie beauty pageants is apt. A kid would imagine fantastic explosions and impossible escapes and BOOM BOOM BOOM: the ad is some adult's clinical idea of what kids' war fantasies look like. In one way it's horrible false--war is bloody hell--in another way, this gets uncomfortable close to the clinical, dispassionate, button-pushing tech wars we're heading toward. It's gross for both reasons.
I'll totally buy my kids war toys if they want them: same for violent video games, books, toy guns, etc. But they'll damn well get copies of Homer's Iliad and Herr's Dispatches when they're teens. My problem is with an ideology of militarism and violence as mere spectacle, professionalism, and bored non-involvement: these aren't war, hence my issues with it.
The word “Controversial” denotes that there are two sides to this story.
There is only one side. This is completely wrong. There is no points were a child using a death machine is correct. This is a slap in the face of humanity.
Everyone that would like to be a human being should be outraged and not allow this to happen for any amount of money!
#10 - Rindan: Actually war itself, not merely war fantasies, is hard-wired into little boys heads. Anybody got the link to the famous study which shows that once the percentage of 14 year-old boys in the population gets past a certain number you invariably have a war with whoever is handy. The purported noble causes are just fig leaves for raging hormones*.
Hence the absolute necessity of providing simulated violence to burn some of that off. People often get cause and effect exactly backwards with war toys, sports or simulations like "counting coup".
Ah, for the good old days of ordering cardboard nuclear submarines from the back pages of your comic books and "enjoy imagining firing your missiles at enemy cities!"
* Not at all coincidentally, war provides greatly enhanced opportunities for rape: which is pretty much the only way that some teenage boys are going to experience sex. This is perfectly understood by a lot of the people running marketing campaigns for assorted slaughters. For example those old time Serbian hymns about the joys of rapine or the extensive chain of rape camps that Robert "Hero of the Left" Mugabee runs for his boys (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7465101.stm ).
Would that a tiny percentage of the energy spent on policing North American toys was spent on lowering the numbers of coked up lads with AK-47s spreading venereal disease. Of course, it's an uphill battle to get anyone to regard that sort of thing as just a lifestyle choice. Here in Ontario the Child Welfare boffins see nothing wrong with sending your kid off to some Al Qaeda camp for live-ammo exercises; for example Omar Khadr.
Anon @20 The only thing more frightening than bad taste in advertising is people so convinced of their own position that they can't conceive of any other viewpoint.
You apparently also missed out on plenty of entertainment in your youth if you can't see the fun in this. While you were watching Captain Planet, the rest of the world played soldiers, cops and robbers or even -gasp- cowboys and indians.
Sure, Pantograph, and some of those kids, like me, grew up to be really critical about the media, and we spend our days decoding noxious imagery like these ads: no doubt the war games we played as kids conditioned our attitudes as adults. So chill. We DO see the fun in this, but we choose to focus on the nasty ideological stuff.
If it makes you feel better, I cry every time I see Black Hawk Down. Not all products of militarism are despicable: but a militarism that extends to pornographic, no-blood war ads aimed at children is fair game for critique.
If the ad showed a small child scaled down and standing next to a group of little green army men would that be offensive?
forty three years ago
http://www.nfb.ca/film/Toys/
To be fair none of these ads are depicting kids in actual COMBAT, just operating the vehicles (military and otherwise) that are sold as miniatures by the toy company.
I don't believe in raising kids in an environment that glorifies violence (my parents didn't let me have any toy that remotely resembled a gun) but it would take a heart of stone not to empathize with a kid wishing he could fly a fighter jet.
So why doesn't anyone get concerned when kids are sold toy lightsabers and x-wing fighters?
Personally, I find this f***ing disgusting. It is all the more remarkably disgusting because it came not from some joker's Photoshop session, but from a REAL ad agency. Way to devalue your own brand and company, guys!
Like #23 TDAWWG said, "a militarism that extends to pornographic, no-blood war ads aimed at children is fair game for critique."
Any little boy who was so beaten down by their parents that they couldn't play a friendly game of MURDER ALL THE BAD GUYS has my utmost pity, because your parents must have laid the smack down pretty hard. I know my mother absolutely forbid anything that even looked like a weapon, and yet I was still merrily destroying planets and slaughtering vast hordes of villains.
Hell, I remember my two favorite toys when I was growing up were the TV controls because I thought they looked like a bad ass space ship that could destroy entire planets, and a slightly crooked stick that made a perfect rifles, sword, or bow and arrow.
I am pretty sure that the little boys who get a toy fighter jet are not going to shipped to the jungle to fight, rape, and pillage. In fact, by virtue of getting said fighter jet, chances are the little kid is probably going to live in a place where they will never be in a war. If you have kids, you can make it your personal goal to crush their fantasies until they only thing they think about is a 9-5 soul sucking job. With my kids though, if they want to go slaughter hordes of villains with pretend guns, I'll get my trust stick out and merrily join the slaughter rather than attempt to crush their soul with pictures of dead child soldiers.
uncorrupted child violence: good
corrupted adult/child violence: bad
OK, try money: is anyone making money? no? probably OK then. Yes? Almost certainly wrong, wrong, wrong.
So... Everyone hates the war plane but no one has a problem with the pimp-mobile? I didn't see anyone complaining how little boys pretending to be pimps could be a bad thing even though it's probably more likely for a kid to grow up to drive a shitty old car and beat women than to grow up and fly a fighter jet.
We wonder why the world is going to hell in a hand basket, yet we spend all this time bitching about something that really doesn't matter rather than actually DOING SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE.
"OK, try money: is anyone making money? no? probably OK then. Yes? Almost certainly wrong, wrong, wrong."
What?
"In 2008, the US spent over $600 billion on defense."
Now who gets to play with toys?