Featured

Welcome to The Stacks of Macson's Featured Article!  Here we post archived articles that you may have missed when they were first published.  Often the Feature is selected for its relevance to a topic discussed in a more recent piece.  Sometimes the Feature is a recently published one of high importance.  Sometimes we choose something just for fun.  Whatever the case, it's worth the read! 

Today's Featured Article is:  "America Embraces the KGB?"                                       
It was originally published on:  February 9, 2010
It was pulled from The Stacks because:  This whole thing still baffles us.  Please, weigh in!
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The first time I saw a commercial for this relatively new text-us-a-question-we'll-answer-it service, I was shocked at what I assumed was a massive corporate oversight: the fact that the company takes the name of the ruthless Soviet secret police force, the KGB. I figured it wouldn't be long before we were seeing similar commercials with the same spokes duo advertizing the same service under some alternate acronym. Not so. It's been months, and KGB commercials still run all the time - they even did a Super Bowl spot. This is what turned out to be KGB's big game spot. They decided to go with the Sumo after their initial proposal was banned by CBS (presumably for its lack of taste, though it is amusing, if not exactly witty). What I want to know is:

how is not a problem for this company that
their two spokescharacters are uniformed "special agents" with the letters "KGB" emblazoned accross their uniforms?

Click to enlarge. Seriously.

Granted, they've chosen to brand in smalt blue and white - way across the color wheel from Soviet red and secret agent black - but this act alone, the act of strategically choosing a less inflammatory color scheme, puzzles me further. If you're going to do that, why not just, oh, I don't know, get a new phone number and call yourself something else? It's not as if other "agencies" don't have names - it doesn't have to be KGB or CIA for us to understand that you're going for a whole secret service thing. We're not that stupid. And isn't the American consumer the slightest turned off by giving their money to a company named after such a polarizing organization? Apparently not. If there were enough of a problem, there'd have been a change, so it looks like we Americans are either ambivalent about the issue or sorely lacking in our world history backgrounds (or, more likely, a combination of the two). I personally think it's ridiculous, but what do you think, am I making too big a deal of this?


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