Cast of Characters:



Karen
Enkidu (AKA Slim)
Beowolf (AKA Wolfie)
Blaze (AKA Blaze)

Thursday, January 18, 2007

National Guard targeting Latinos

I've seen a number of military ads targeting Latinos in the last few days. I guess that's how they're planning to come up with the extra troops that Bush wants to send to Iraq.

The ads are completely in Spanish, except for the phone number at the end, which is spoken in accented English. Interestingly enough, there is no link to Spanish language information on the recruiting website.

It struck me as odd to have Spanish only ads. On the other hand, I guess one could consider it equal opportunity exposure.

But on the other hand, I haven't seen any English language ads lately.

1 comment:

r_bayless said...

Very interesting. I haven't personally seen any such U.S. military commercials in Spanish here in Columbus, Ohio; however, I certainly HAVE seen a recent increase in overall advertising (especially by the U.S. Army) - so I guess I must sort of disagree with that part of your posting. (If I see one more "Army Strong" ad, I might just puke.)

I have two (somewhat conflicting) thoughts on the subject:

1. It's funny/sad how so much of the country wants to clamp down extremely hard on all the illegal aliens and make English the national language (and essentially require only its use - at least for anything having to do with the government) ... but the government would still be happy to use them in Iraq as IED targets ... er, I mean soldiers.

2. Keep in mind that the latino population in the U.S. is now about 12% of the entire population - it has surpassed the black population (about 10% or 11% of the overall population). So, perhaps the military is simply innocently advertising to them because they are now a decently large (and are the most rapidly increasing) portion of our population.