Commentary

Looking out for number one

A COUPLE WEEKS ago My Friend P and I wrote about just how entertaining advertisements on cable were - from Digger the Dermaphodite to the brave actors and actresses who are portraying herpes-infected persons.

Jamaica, by no shadow of the imagination, comes nowhere close to the quality of foreign ads. Though there are always great glimmers of hope - such as the current Lucky 5 ad featuring Princess and her pathetic little boyfriend who dumps her just seconds before she was about to tell him she won half a million dollars. Kudos to the those who developed that one.

Where's the moral?

However, the current DB&G ad campaign is of grave concern to P and I as this, like other DB&G campaigns before, seems to be devoid of moral substance. Of course, one might reasonably argue that morality and making money are not cut from the same cloth and, in truth, have nothing much to do with each other but P and I disagree.

The investment company once had an ad with two young schoolboys sitting under a tree at school with a laptop and the great catch theme from that campaign was to work smarter, not harder. Now I ask you, isn't the concept of not working hard the essence of 'ginnalship' and 'Anancyism'? Now don't get us wrong, we see nothing wrong with working smarter but why would anyone want to suggest that you work smarter at the expense of working hard - using little boys as the role models to boot!

But now DB&G tips the scales even further with a campaign that ought to be labelled the art of selfish thinking. There is a series of these ads that I am sure some ad agency feels very proud about, where it is all about looking out for number one and number one only. The two from the series that really got our gall are one with a father showing his son his inheritance to be - that ends up being a dilapidated shack on a piece of property; the other is that of a father at the dinner table asking his daughter to share some of her meal with him and she flatly says 'no' after taunting him with a morsel on a spoon in front of his mouth.

Prime lesson we guess: Look after your own needs, don't depend on others. Fair enough. But what are the subliminal messages to children and parents. Children learn they have no need to think about the welfare of their parents when they get older, and parents, that they must not invest in the interest of their children when they grow up.

Wealth creation is something that happens over time. Many families are wealthy today because of sustained building blocks of wealth by previous generations - legacy wealth. Nothing is wrong with accumulation of success, DB&G. So OK, Junior was being giving a dilapidated house - but it was on land, there are possibilities there.

Children should honour their mother and father, not be taught to scorn them. And did you know that under the law, parents can drag their children before the courts to sue for support if they are neglected in their old age? Say you saw it in THE STAR - I did a couple weeks ago in the Legal Eagle column.

Those ads seriously disturb P and I. We wish there was something that we could do about them - but we are not sure if there is anything since maybe they truly reflect the core values of a country that has in many ways lost its moral compass.

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