After watching this ad, to repurpose the old Superman tagline: You’ll believe a snack commercial can make you cry.
This week saw the launch of “Bold Love,” a new Spanish-language Doritos advertisement that will air in Mexico, featuring a surprisingly heartfelt scene of lesbian love in the face of homophobia. The two-minute ad shows two women on a nighttime road trip, one eating the chips, naturally, in the passenger’s seat.
If there was any doubt in viewers’ minds as to whether the gals are merely pals who hold hands on the gear shift, the passenger smiles and says “I love you so much,” to which the driver replies “how much?” At first, the reply is playful: Her girlfriend will bring her the full moon and the stars in the sky. But then things turn more serious.
“I would introduce you as my girlfriend to my whole family, even if my grandmother and my father stop talking to me,” the passenger says. “I’d ask you to go to work with me every day, with a bouquet of flowers, even if it meant they’d fire me.”
The ad closes with a quick succession of statistics about LGBTQ+ discrimination: 33% of LGBTQ+ people have reported facing employment discrimination in Mexico, and judges in some Spanish-speaking countries, including Colombia, have refused to marry gay and lesbian couples even when such unions are the law of the land. The couple drives off into the night as Elle Valenci’s “Perfect Blue” plays over the ad’s title.
“Bold Love” is part of the company’s “Pride All Year” campaign, featuring LGBTQ+ positivity in international contexts, meaning someone in marketing has been reading all your Tweets about how brands don’t care about queers after July 1.
We do like it when rainbow capitalism reaches higher than the bare minimum, but as always, remember to follow the money; all your gay little Dorito dollars might end up in the hands of homophobic conservatives, as Frito-Lay’s parent company PepsiCo donated more than $115,000 to Republican groups and candidates in 2021 alone. Taking money from LGBTQ+ folks and giving it to the people passing laws against our rights and families? Hey, that’s not bold or love!
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