Action sport cam in “racist mess!”

Ironic racism makes a comeback! Maybe!

Do you remember the heady 2000s when extreme sports turned into action sports and could be used to sell anything from poorly conceptualized music tours to poorly designed cell phones?

Boost Mobile!

That’s right. Boost was an action sport cellular service sponsoring the likes of Andy Irons and probably Bruce (?) etc. Their orange sticker was yo and their messaging was fresh. Action! Sports! Yo!

The company mostly went away due to probably bad service (?). It was busted in Australia for promising 100 text messages for 1 dollar and then that not being altogether true. Whatevs! Shred yo!

In any case, company founder, Peter Adderton went on to launch an action sport camera that delivers 360 degrees vertical/240 degree horizontal panoramic view all in 4k. Yo! I assume the resulting footage is supposed to be used in a virtual reality headset.

Mr. Adderton wanted to show how awesome catching a wider view is and so he commissioned a commercial that features a Trump look alike, a wall and Mexicans. It is not very funny, though clearly parody.

The Los Angeles Times, AdWeek, Gizmodo etc. were each ashamed of it.

TechCrunch, the industry’s leading tech blog, wrote:

What do you do when nobody is paying attention to your 360-degree camera brand? Well, you have a couple of options. You could put together a campaign that shows how awesome your tech is and how it is the perfect match to your target audiences.

Or you could go the other way, enlisting a Trump impersonator and an inexcusable dollop of stereotypes to try to get the word out.

I spoke with 360fly’s CEO Peter Adderton, who claims that 90% of the people they surveyed don’t have a problem with the ad, and that the advert is actually meant to beanti-racist.

“We aren’t idiots. We knew that the ad would be controversial,” said Adderton, saying that he expected that 1% of viewers would hate the advert. “But the feedback from the community has been unbelievable. People tell us they love the spot and say it’s extremely funny.”

“Every other camera out there only shows what is in front of you. It wants to believe just one thing,” says Adderton, drawing a parallel with what is going on in US politics. “In the ad, we have our 360-degree camera bring all the views together, and we say there is a better way. We are trying to bring people together.”

Mr. Adderton, who is Australian, then went on to say he would be a Republican if he was an American citizen.

The best part of the whole racist mess is that 360fly said the spot was rejected by television channels for being too extreme. After researching, neither the Los Angeles Times nor TechCrunch could come up with a single television ad buyer who rejected it.

Tame, not very funny ironic racism that stirs the rage of tech blogs and newspapers but doesn’t actually get rejected from TV because it is not actually very racy and/or 360fly did not have enough money left over to pay for airtime?

Gold!

Yo!