Controversy Over Paris Hilton Ad for Hamburger Chain

Critics Are Saying 'That's Too Hot' of Sexy Carl's Jr. Ad

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/la-hiltoncarlsjr-link,0,555752.hyperlink?coll=ny-entertainment-headlines

Spicy (Reuters) Watch ad here

By Meg James
Times Staff Writer
Published May 24, 2005

As in a racy music video, a scantily clad Paris Hilton cavorts with a water hose as she washes a black Bentley, while singer Eleni Mandell's sultry version of Cole Porter's "I Love Paris" pulsates throughout.

After a sensuous sudsing of the Bentley and herself, Hilton takes a bite out of a new Carl's Jr. hamburger. Hilton's image then fades to a tagline echoing the reality TV star's two-word mantra: "That's hot."

Perhaps a little too hot.

Since premiering late last week, the Hilton burger commercial is getting the kind of attention Carl's Jr. wanted. But the ad's blatant sexual overtones are getting under the skin of critics, who say it sets a new low in TV advertising.

"This commercial is basically soft-core porn," said Melissa Caldwell, research director for the Parents Television Council. "It's inappropriate for television."

The Los Angeles-based advocacy group plans to mobilize its more than 1 million members to protest and is considering petitioning the Federal Communications Commission for a ruling on whether the advertisements are indecent.

For parent company CKE Restaurants Inc. of Carpinteria, Hilton has proved an effective way to get attention for the spicy new burger she was hired to sell.

The company said that its website even crashed on Friday as people clamored to view an expanded version of the commercial.

Carl's Jr. marketing chief Brad Haley was unavailable for comment Monday. In a promotional video on the company's website, he explained the concept as: "Great-looking actress, great-looking car, great-looking burger, that's pretty much the idea."

Claudia Caplan, chief marketing officer for Mendelsohn Zein Advertising in Los Angeles, said the agency designed the commercial to play off Hilton's notoriety and grab the attention of Carl's Jr.'s target demographic of 18-to-34-year-old men.

"Look, we're never going to have McDonald's advertising budget or Burger King's budget," Caplan said. "Whatever we do has to have an effect that is multiplied over several platforms. It needs to be more than just a television commercial."

The granddaughter of hotel magnate Barron Hilton, Paris Hilton became an Internet legend when a sex tape shot by her then-boyfriend showed up on the Web. Hilton later starred in the Fox reality show "The Simple Life," which showed the 24-year-old heiress and a friend doing ordinary jobs, including a failed effort working at a fast-food restaurant.

The Hilton ad is the latest in a string of controversial, often suggestive ads for Carl's Jr. that show how far the company has come from the days when it was run by founder Carl Karcher. The prominent Orange County Republican once had a statue of St. Francis of Assisi placed in the foyer of the company's Anaheim headquarters.

Since Karcher was ousted as chairman in 1993, the company has hired the likes of former basketball bad boy Dennis Rodman and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner for its commercials. Now 88, Karcher could not be reached for comment.

Recently, Mendelsohn created for Carl's Jr. a commercial showing a woman gyrating on a mechanical bull while taking bites of a burger. In another, young men ogle a pretty woman and take bets on whether she will spill a juicy Carl's burger on her blouse.

Stuart Fischoff, a media psychologist at Cal State Los Angeles, said the Hilton commercial went well beyond other Carl's ads targeted at young men and boys.

"This could come back and bite them in the behind," Fischoff said. "We're in the throes of a culture war in this country, and for them to be pushing the envelope like this at this time could be very dangerous."

Knowing the media's infatuation with Hilton, Carl's and its ad agency gave a sneak look to "Entertainment Tonight." They also built a separate website called SpicyParis.com to play a 60-second version of the commercial.

In the last few days, spots ran during sports programs, on ABC's "Desperate Housewives" finale Sunday and on the season-ending episodes of Fox's "The O.C." and NBC's "The Apprentice."

A similar ad with Hilton for CKE's Hardee's hamburger chain is expected to air next month.

Executives at Los Angeles television stations said they had received few complaints about the commercial's content. Whether its message is effective is another matter.

Peter Sealey, adjunct marketing professor at UC Berkeley, said that although the ad might be remembered by viewers, it might ultimately hurt the Carl's Jr. brand.

"This is the ultimate in bimbo advertising," Sealey said. "If you are Hooters and you have buxom young waitresses, that's fine. But Carl's Jr. is more mainstream. They've got families going in there."

TV Bites Back
A new coalition to fight regulation of television content has some unlikely supporters on the right.

May 27 - You know that a group is powerful when it’s willing to take on Paris Hilton. This week, cable news channels flooded their airwaves with clips of a commercial for the Carl’s Jr. fast-food chain in which the swimsuit-clad celebutante devours a hamburger while washing a Bentley (and, mostly, herself). They weren’t showing the images to turn their viewers on—at least not officially. The Paris pictures were news because the Parents Television Council (PTC), an influential broadcast-decency group, wants the ad banished to late-night television or off the airwaves altogether. The ad "meets the exact definition of pornography,” Tim Winter, the group’s executive director, tells NEWSWEEK. “Families shouldn’t have to be subjected to that.”

An attack on Paris is always a stop-the-presses story. But the Carl's Jr. ad is just the latest high-profile target of the movement to get racy images off of TV. In the year and a half since Janet Jackson bared most of her breast on national television at the Super Bowl, conservative groups have led an unprecedented charge for the federal government to take more aggressive steps to keep questionable content off the airwaves. Everything from the kids’ cartoon “Postcards with Buster” (for featuring a lesbian couple) to broadcasts of the unsettling films “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindler’s List” have come in the cross hairs of the TV-decency police. Supported by conservative allies in Congress, groups like the PTC have put significant pressure on the Federal Communications Commission to go after naughty television, leaving big media companies cowering in fear.

Now, though, broadcasters may finally have found the powerful allies they need to fight back. It's not the usual suspects: earlier this month, three major media conglomerates—NBC Universal, Viacom and News Corp.—joined with entertainment industry groups and free-market advocates to launch TV Watch, an advocacy group that seeks to limit government intervention in broadcasting content. In its own words, TV Watch wants to help parents monitor their children’s exposure to questionable content by using the TV ratings system and other parental controls. To its detractors, TV Watch is a front for the media companies to keep the sleazy stuff on TV. But whatever its true agenda, TV Watch is breaking new ground by framing its opposition to government policing of the airwaves as a defense of free markets. In so doing, it has been gaining the support of some of the country’s most prominent conservative groups. These groups’ willingness to speak out against media crusaders could signal not just a change in the decency debate, but a growing uneasiness among Republicans with the party’s anti-Hollywood agenda.

To be sure, TV Watch doesn’t want to be seen as a supporter of indecent content. Jim Dyke, TV Watch’s executive director, says one of the coalition’s charter objectives is to educate parents on ways they can prevent questionable content from coming into their homes through use of devices like the V-chip. He says use of the V-chip and the television ratings system hasn’t caught on with American parents because they assume it’s too much of a hassle to keep the questionable programming out. “They think, I want to watch my TV, I don’t want to build it,” Dyke tells NEWSWEEK. “But the fact is, it’s literally a four-step process. And it can help parents shield their kids ... and that’s appropriate.”

What TV Watch finds inappropriate is excessive government regulation of television. Dyke believes that lawmakers who’ve put pressure on the FCC to more aggressively police content on the airwaves are setting a dangerous precedent. “Why should we trust government to come up with the standards? Standards for who? I can’t even agree with my wife about what we ought to watch on television. Do you really think government is going to be able to come up with a standard for all of us?”

With its free-market focus, TV Watch has attracted some unlikely power players to its coalition, namely conservative Republicans. In addition to media giants Viacom, NBC Universal and News Corp. (whose own holdings include the right-leaning Fox News Network), coalition members include the American Conservative Union, the influential right-wing alliance, as well as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, a fiscal-conservative haven. Norquist says his group supports efforts like that of TV Watch because “we have got to have a free-market-on-media approach.” Many conservatives, Norquist says, have grown uncomfortable with the increasing zeal for policing broadcast content. “It’s socialism,” Norquist says. “People are saying, ‘This is puritanical Puritanism.’ No, it’s still socialism, dressing it up and getting a minister to say it doesn’t change that.”

These strong words speak to a growing fissure between the fiscal conservative and social conservative factions of the Republican base. Perhaps fearing defections from true believers, the Parents Television Council (which maintains a nonpartisan identity) has gone out of its way to deride TV Watch as a “hired gun coalition” of conservatives doing the bidding for media overlords. “Some of these organizations, like the American Conservative Union and Americans for Tax Reform, have never given a moment’s thought to the suffocating sewage coming from the entertainment industry,” the group’s president, L. Brent Bozell, said shortly after the creation of TV Watch. “That in and of itself is shameful.” These words carry weight: the PTC's 1 million plus members routinely jam switchboards in Congress and at the FCC.

But Norquist scoffs at the PTC’s assertion that he and other conservatives are doing someone else’s dirty work for personal gain rather than principled belief. He says that groups like the PTC are acting against the interests of families by limiting parents’ right to decide for themselves what content they want coming into their home. “You can’t have a parents’-rights movement without having some respect for parents’ rights,” he says. What’s more, Norquist believes that he, not groups like the PTC, speak for the mainstream of the Republican Party. “[Bozell] has spent more time talking about this than we have ... The truth is that nobody in the conservative movement, or damn close to nobody, agrees with him on this.”

No one is suggesting, however, that groups like TV Watch yet constitute a real threat to anti-indecency advocates like Bozell, whose watchdog group also protested the singer Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction," in which most of her breast was exposed at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. The group’s goals so far are small: increase awareness about existing controls available to parents and spread the idea that Americans are uncomfortable with government deciding what should go on TV. The PTC, meanwhile, is gearing up for a multiyear campaign to stop cable companies from bundling channels together, so that parents can keep offensive channels from ever reaching their homes. But Dyke says that TV Watch will act aggressively in the coming months to counteract the anti-indecency group's efforts. He says time is of the essence. “We’re already seeing a chilling effect. If we’re not careful, we could have a situation where we leave it to our government to decide what we do and do not see"—an outcome that, to paraphrase Paris Hilton, would not be hot.

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first: Paris Hilton's TV commercial for the Carl's Jr. fast-food chain, now being downloaded at a computer near you, is a shoddy, shameless, plainly outrageous publicity stunt that all decent, right-thinking people will condemn.

Paris's 30-second bump-and-grind with a Bentley, a garden hose and a hamburger is a landmark piece of bad taste. It's also an ingenious bit of hucksterism, a marketing coup fueled by a vision that is pure and simple, and altogether rare, in an age of corporate committee-think.

Many companies peddle sex while trying to peddle something else. But it's not every day that a company peddling sex creates a server-crashing commercial that engenders buzz far beyond a few paid airings. Everything had to come together for such a button-pushing masterpiece to succeed.

And it did. Just take this simple test: Had you ever heard of Carl's Jr. before Paris Hilton started washing cars for the chain? Unless you've lived out West -- Carl's is a California-based chain that has no franchises east of Oklahoma and doesn't advertise nationally -- chances are you hadn't.

You have now. That's because the ad has achieved what few ads ever do: a life beyond the next commercial break. Carl's is spending just $4 million to $5 million to buy air time over the next two months in a handful of Western cities, but the freebie exposure has been many times that. The Hilton commercial has gotten attention from countless newspapers and local newscasts, from all the cable news networks, "Today," "Entertainment Tonight" and even ESPN. The pretext is the "controversy" -- the Parents Television Council helpfully played along by calling it "basically soft-core porn" -- but that's just an excuse for airing footage of Ms. Hilton sudsing up (and you didn't think we'd print a jaded commentary about filth and degradation without including saucy pictures of it, did you?).

What Carl's (and its ad agency, Mendelsohn-Zein of Los Angeles) did was strip its selling proposition to its chassis. Since young men between the ages of 18 and 34 are Carl's core customers, it wasn't hard to figure out what grabs their attention.

But filling your ad with scantily clad babes and expensive cars alone doesn't get you denounced by moralists and discussed on CNN. In fact, Carl's has tried generic exploitation in the past, to limited effect. Its most recent commercial showed a young woman gyrating on a mechanical bull while eating a burger; in another, young men take bets on whether an attractive woman will splatter some of the contents of her juicy burger on her blouse. Its slogan: "If it doesn't get all over the place, it doesn't belong in your face."

Edgy, maybe, but not hormonal enough. This time around, Carl's did two very clever things.

The first was to keep the concept simple and uncluttered. "We absolutely meant to be racy," says Brad Haley, Carl's executive vice president of marketing. Indeed, there's no story line and very little sales pitch. The ad features nothing but the almost-naked babe, a shiny car and a lot of suds. Except for a brief shot of Hilton biting into a burger, the commercial could just as easily be selling Bentleys, garden supplies or Turtle Wax.

The glossy, generic quality was part of the plan, too. "It was designed to be like a music video," Haley says. "This was written for young men who are doing a dozen things -- playing video games, listening to their iPods, looking at the Internet, watching MTV. These days, watching TV is the least of all those activities."

What made the ad something more than merely titillating was its second masterstroke: casting Paris Hilton. For Paris isn't just any blond bimbo writhing on a Bentley. She's the blond bimbo of the year (Haley wouldn't disclose how much Hilton got to appear in the ad, but he noted: "The media rebroadcasts are worth far more than we paid her.")

Hilton is a remarkable creation: a young woman (she's 24) with a famous last name (she is the great-granddaughter of hotel magnate Conrad Hilton) and no visible talent other than an uncanny ability to keep attracting attention. Unlike fellow blondes Jessica Simpson, who play-acts at being ditsy, or Pamela Anderson, who seems terribly calculating and obvious, Hilton seems to come by her dimness the honest, natural way. On her reality show, "The Simple Life"; on Letterman and Leno's couch she comes off as something uncontrived, even genuine -- a rich, good-time gal without a complicated thought in her head. Her infamous "private" sex tape that appeared all over the Internet did nothing to harm her party-hearty cred.

Maybe it's an act, like Madonna's clever media manipulations of years ago, but it's an act -- and an image -- Hilton controls awfully well.

Hilton's emptiness, in fact, makes her a kind of iconic figure (she wisely doesn't utter a single word in the Carl's Jr. ad). She's in many ways a sleazier version of Vanna White, who never said much in all those years of turning letters on "Wheel of Fortune." That's why White was strangely beloved. By never revealing anything specific about herself, White became to many observers the perfect "empty vessel" onto which any narrative could be plausibly pasted. Was she the girl next door? The hot babe? The adoring wife? The perfect daughter or granddaughter?

There is, ultimately, something remarkable about the sheer gall of the Carl's commercial. In a post-feminist age, in an age of jaded consumerism, advertisers that use sex to sell tend to do so by making at least some nod toward the ridiculousness of using sex to sell. Remember the blatantly absurd Swedish Bikini Team ads for Old Milwaukee beer in the early '90s? Or the Miller Lite "catfight" commercial of 2003 in which two bodacious young women get into an argument that leads them to tear each other's clothes off, tumble into a fountain and wrestle in wet cement?

Haley, the marketing executive, argues that the Paris ad is similarly over the top, recalling as it does the car-washing scene in "Cool Hand Luke" as well as every Whitesnake or Motley Crue video from the 1980s. But that seems like a stretch. It's hard to find any winking subtlety, much less an homage au cinéma , in Paris Hilton in a skimpy bathing suit cavorting with a spraying hose.

For its part, the Parents Television Council has backed off its threat to file an indecency complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. That's too bad for Carl's and Hilton, both of whom would have enjoyed another round of free media exposure.

Instead, they'll have to pursue publicity the old-fashioned way. Stay tuned. A new version of the Hilton commercial, this time for Hardee's (which is owned by Carl's parent company), is coming to cities in the Midwest and Southeast in June.

There are lessons in that Paris Hilton burger ad, and they do not include the point that American males will watch a skinny, spoiled hotel heiress in a swimsuit flop around on a car.

Nor do they include the realization that Carl's Jr. seems happy with criticism if it's making money. That's their defense, incidentally: commerce. "This is an attempt to sell hamburgers. Get a grip," the company's CEO, Andy Puzder, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times.

The real lessons begin with this: In this swiftly shifting world of TV technology, digital recorders, blogs, Web sites, cable news and whatever else shows up in our cell phones tomorrow, advertisers are miles ahead of the rest of us.

Their messages are louder, more pervasive, more alluring than ever, and most of the time, we realize it.

Let's look at this case study. Carl's Jr. has been selling to young men for years with suggestive ads, and all they got was minor attention.They tried a sexy woman dripping her burger on a white blouse, and they tried a sexy woman riding a mechanical bull.

All they got was minor attention. So along comes Paris. Carl’s Jr. hit the jackpot.

Why? For starters, the outrage industry went nuts. That’s always good for publicity.

"I think that becomes the goal in this type of situation," said Jack Myers, the editor-in-chief of MediaVillage.com and a respected advertising and media analyst New York. "You pray for that. It’s almost the best thing that can happen to you when you’ve got a campaign like Carl’s Jr. has."

One group in particular, the Parent’s Television Council, was everywhere. They say they hate ads like this, but you have to think, in their private meetings, they were thrilled to see Paris in suds. It gave them an organizing and money-raising tool. Their Web site brags about how their leaders made the rounds of all the national TV talk shows to say the spot was indecent.

And who could disagree? It’s Paris Hilton eating a 1,000-calorie burger. You know this is a lie. She hasn’t had 1,000 calories in a sitting in years, and, yeah, that’s probably a cheap shot.

Back in the media world, we now have a political protest going, and we have bloggers yammering away. All of that gives the news industry, particularly the TV news industry, an excuse to run and rerun the spot.

There is nothing better, if you’re local TV news, than a steamy TV ad with a faux political connection. You can pretend you’re doing serious journalism, while you can tease viewers with something like, "Is the sexy burger ad too hot for TV? We’ll show you at 11."

Already, it’s paying off for Carl’s Jr. They’ve been getting replays for free.

"I do think they got want they wanted," Myers said in a phone interview. "Everyone is strategizing now how to break through the clutter (of messages) and how to avoid all the commercial-blocking technology out there.

"They followed the Paris Hilton formula: It doesn’t matter if you’re out there naked as long as you’re out there. They reached their target audience, those 18- to 34-year-olds."

Print news outlets — newspapers and magazines — were hot on the story, as well. And Web sites from pretty much everyone, including the Los Angeles Times, Business Week and The Sacramento Bee, had a link to the ad so readers could see what the fuss was about.

But it’s not just media sites. The Parent’s Television Council has a link to the ad. You can’t be outraged if you can’t watch it a few times to be sure.

That, probably as much as the buzz, is what Carl’s Jr. was after. Those 18- to 34-year-old men look at Web sites. They get their news online, from newspaper sites, from Reuters, from Yahoo. So they are besieged these days with Paris Hilton links. Carl’s Jr.’s own site, which has a 60-second version — as every 18- to 34-year-old male could tell you — has been so busy, it’s crashed at least once.

This is why talk about digital recorders or filters stopping unwanted advertising or contacts is so hollow. As the forms of media and communication morph and multiply, as technology evolves and re-evolves almost daily, the information we get, the ideas and items and sometimes bald-faced-lies that swamp us, morph and multiply at the same rate.

And there is no way to slow it. The advertising world, the ideological message industry, the ranks of political operatives masked as do-gooders and bloggers, are filled with smart people who think constantly about using those new tools, and about using the practices of the old media, to have their say and make their pitch.

This time, it was pretty harmless: just a little sex and a hamburger. But these kinds of stealth campaigns — sometimes brilliantly upfront, yet still stealth campaigns — are happening everywhere and all the time, about products, about politics, about the world.

That’s what’s truly frightening. As for Paris Hilton, if she wants to clog her arteries, let her.