Don’t Buy Twix!

The weird phenomenon of woke capitalism persists. This time it is Mars, Inc., maker of Twix candy bars. Mars released this two-minute video for Halloween, no doubt the biggest season of the year for Twix sales:

Via InstaPundit. I won’t try to improve on James Lileks’ comments, quoted there:

So yes, it’s real, and it’s Twix endorsed. It doesn’t really matter how you think about it. What you learn is how Twix thinks about you. They think you’ll love it, and if you don’t, you’re on the wrong side.

Twix believed this clarification was necessary, I guess.

Also Rod Dreher:

What is the message of this two-minute clip? That genderfluidity is right and good, and opposing it is what wicked bullies do. … This is an aspect of the weird totalitarianism we are living through today. We have seen harder manifestations in cases where physicians, academics, and others lose their jobs for questioning transgender ideology. Things like the Twix ad cannot be understood as apart from the overall message discipline of the Left: that there is only one permissible opinion to hold, and those who do not hold it are enemies to be crushed.

That is certainly true, yet one wonders what Mars management was thinking. A two-minute ad like this one can’t air on television, and Mars doesn’t seem to have promoted it heavily on the internet. They evidently hoped it would go viral and give them a lot of free advertising. For that to make sense, they likely thought the ad would be promoted and shared by people who agree with it, while others–the large majority–wouldn’t see it.

That’s a cynical strategy underlying a fundamentally bad message. And, as Glenn Reynolds says, “That’s a curious message from a manufacturer of candy bars, but this is where we are in 2021, I guess.”

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