Bayo apologizes for the What's Your Mix ad campaign

This is a follow-up from the previous entry on Bayo's What's Your Mix ad campaign.

The clothing company's vice president, Lyn Agustin, issued the following statement:

"We, at Bayo, deeply apologize for the message our campaign—“What’s Your Mix?”—has unintentionally conveyed. We would like to express our regrets to those who have been offended or felt discriminated against.

Our company and our partners have always taken pride in being pro-Filipino as we continue to celebrate our uniqueness and achievements. We believe that being a Filipino will always make you 100% beautiful. It is unfortunate that this message got lost along the way.

We thank everyone who has shown support for our thrust of promoting Filipino beauty, talent, and creativity."

You can read more about this in Yahoo and Interaksyon. ABS-CBN also reports that the clothing brand has decided to junk the whole What's your Mix campaign.


The problem with the Bayo ad campaign is that it sends different messages depending on how you look at it. Look at this one for instance (excerpt from the copy):

Call it biased, but the mixing and matching of different nationalities with Filipino blood is almost a sure formula for someone beautiful and world class.

You can interpret it as saying that anyone with a Filipino blood is sure to be "beautiful and world class" or you can interpret it as you have to be with a mixed lineage to amount to something.
 
So it really boils down to the company's ignorance when it showed the ad campaign to the public.

 

On a side note

This issue is oftentimes associated with another one from the past. Remember FHM's Stepping out of the Shadows cover featuring Bela Padilla? It's not only the African Americans that the magazine failed to consider, but also Filipinos who are naturally brown skinned and Aetas.

Connection? Same ignorance applies.

 

Are people just overreacting?

The ads divided the public: some are on uproar, and some are saying that there's nothing wrong with the ads. I think the only time you can treat this lightly is if you purposely ignore the implied message of this marketing campaign. I stand by what I said earlier: you can't look at it without taking cultural context into account, and so it goes to say that if you're 100% Filipino and look 100% Filipino, you're not good enough.

It's basically the same reason why whitening products are all the rage, because supposedly the more non-native you look, the cooler you are.


Final say: the ads are more appropriate in a dating site rather than a marketing campaign for a clothing brand.

And kudos Bayo, you got yourself some publicity.