Amoy Asianate yourself application on Facebook
For those of you who haven’t seen it Amoy, a Hong Kong-based company who sells Asian cooking product put an ‘Asianate’ yourself application on Facebook. Quite frankly, I was surprised by the creative. I might have expected it from a mainland brand. But Hong Kong is cosmopolitan enough to realise that this wasn’t a bright move.
It seems to have sparked quite a conversation in social media so I looked into it a bit further.
I was expecting the kind of mess that appeared when the Spanish basketball team did their Asian ‘slant eyes’ photo. And some comments on Twitter compared the Amoy application with Black & White minstrels blacking up.
However at the time I write this post the backlash doesn’t seem to have arrived at least in the kind of volumes I was expecting and much of the criticism seems to be from chatter within the agency world. Is the Amoy Asianate application just too mediocre for anyone to care? Did they pull out the media spend supporting the campaign or it is just taking a while for the consumer controversy to gather a decent head of steam?
If so how much of the outrage will be stoked by mainstream media outlets? More related content here.