Racist ice cream? Scandal over Obama ad

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Published time: March 21, 2009 02:51
Edited time: March 21, 2009 05:51

“Everyone's talking about it: dark inside white,” says a slogan for a Russian advertisement of an ice cream that uses the image of American president Barack Obama. Critics have labeled the ad racist.

Creators of the ad, which features smiling Obama standing in front of Capitol Hill, claim that there is nothing racist in what they call just a joke.

“For Russia, this is not racism. It is fun and that's it,” Andrey Gubaidullin, creative director at Voskhod advertising agency, based in the Urals Mountain city of Yekaterinburg, was quoted by AFP as saying. “We don't consider teasing ethnic groups. It is just seen as a joke.”

The ice cream has a chocolate flavored centre, imbedded in a vanilla layer, the feature which seems to have pushed advertisers’ creative thinking.

There's another ad for a banana-strawberry taste of the same brand that has a picture of a girl with a banana which says ‘Look at the banana – think about strawberry’.

In Russian the word ‘strawberry’ can also mean sexual adventure.