Stop Using President Obama to Sell Stuff!

Note to the international community: Cut it out! Stop using President Obama to sell snacks and services.

First there was Obama chicken fingers from Germany. Now, there's Duet ice cream out of Russia to add to the color obsessed Obama-food pyramid:

MOSCOW (Reuters) – A Russian advertising agency has used an image resembling U.S. President Barack Obama to promote a new vanilla-and-chocolate ice cream, drawing the ire of human rights groups who said the ad was vulgar.

Ice Cream Plant No. 3 in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg launched last week a new brand named Duet.

The poster features a computer-generated caricature of a broadly smiling figure resembling Obama standing in front of the [Capitol] with the ice cream in the foreground.

The strapline reads: "It's on everyone's lips -- the Dark is in the White!" Source

"We wanted to make the print amusing and cheerful, just as joyful and pleasant as the process of eating an ice cream," Yevgeny Primachenko, deputy creative director of Voskhod advertisement agency, told Reuters by phone from Yekaterinburg.

"This is just a vanilla ice cream with a chocolate filling," Primachenko said. "We decided: why not use such a great news peg as the election of the first black U.S. president to the White House, while showing no political preferences at the same time?"

Prominent Russian human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov rapped the advertisement as "a vulgar exploitation of some political symbols in pursuit of commercial interests."

He added however: "I do not think the person who created this is necessarily a racist ... But our society is xenophobic all the same."

Russia has a growing problem with violent racist attacks on dark-skinned immigrants. Source

Is this ad racist? Well, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, you don't see product campaigns anchored on Medvedev's whiteness or any other world leader's skin color. But on the other, savvy entrepreneurs will do anything to grab consumer attention and make a buck. Green is the only color they really see.

But these ads are surely objectifying. And there is clearly a skin-color obsession at play. The Duet ad focuses less on political "change" and more on color. One could capitalize on the new wave in American politics without focusing on our president's blackness. (Save your keystroke. I know he's biracial, but he self-identifies as black so that's what I'm going with.)