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January 14, 2005 Whiskas Catfood Racist to Chinese

I wasn’t going to blog about the Whiskas TV commercial that features a Chinese girl that speaks in an obvious Chinaman accent. I wasn’t going to bore you about my paranoid delusions that Whiskas is waging cultural warfare on how Whiskas (Western) is superior to some unknown Chinese brand (Eastern, duh). But then I saw the second TVC in this ad campaign, and well, you’ll have to be subject to me taking apart Whiskas.

In the first TVC, a Chinese girl hands her gweilo lover a pack of Chinese cat food to feed the cat, who obviously only loves Whiskas. The boyfriend, knowing better, empties out the pack of Chinese catfood into the bin and then pours Whiskas crapfood into the pack, which he subsequently feeds to the cat. The girlfriend comes back and in her best Chinagirl accents says “Oooo, cat love Chinese catfood!”. The outtake from that TV ad is that cats know the difference between Whiskas and something else.

Evidently the creative team that was behind that TVC doesn’t know the difference between Chinese and Japanese. The first mistake being that the “Chinese catfood” looks more Japanese in nature. But the biggest mistake is that this cutesy girl image belongs closer to the Japanese stereotype than the Chinese stereotype, if anything. I’ve never come across any Chinese girls in London and Hong Kong, nor any mainland Chinese girls that have ever looked so stupidly cutesy.

But then again, none of the Japanese girls I know sound or behave like that either.

But the creative team should be able to tell the difference. In the second TVC, the rice-fevered boyfriend asks an Asian shop assistant where the Whiskas is. Obviously, the Asian guy is lazy and says something about all the catfood being the same. We all knew that Asians are lazy, right? Anyway, boyfriend ends up buying the mediocre catfood and lo-and-behold the cat doesn’t take to it. Cats, again, apparently know the difference.

So it’s nice for the creative team to spin the lie that cats can tell the difference, let alone give a damn, when they themselves can’t tell the difference between the subtleties of different Asian mannerisms. This is being as diplomatic as I can be. The truth is that these two TVC’s perpetuate the Asian stereotypes that circulate about Asians in the Western world, both of which are derogatory. Perhaps the creative team has some personal vendetta against Asian folk? Or maybe Whiskas feels the need to alienate its Asian audience or prepare European audiences for the inevitable China expansion into the catfood market.

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