Either I'm naive or you're cynical, but as a former employee of an M&M / Mars factory and a person with a family, I can say I was definitely concerned about quality control and producing a product that was safe and tasty for all of the customers.

I like how you so easily reduce the low-wage workers to faceless assholes as you do Pepperidge Farms.

Do you think they care about other people only when they're off the clock?

I can't really disagree with Kyle. I read the ad to mean that workers are people who care about the product they make because they have families too, and are also consumers.

I see the commodification of family togetherness, but you needn't erase the working class.

I'm late to this, but, I read it differently...if you look at the series of photos at the bottom of the page, you will see the recipe written out in a child's scrawl, intimating that it is not the worker in the factory baking the goldfish but the parent at home with the child (to say nothing of how it fetishizes production...cheese, grain, bake = magic!). I think the whole ad rests on the assumption that the worker is cut out of the production and that the product brings parent and child together by presuming the parent produced the cracker (see the hand-grated cheese in a household bowl). If you are pissed about the erasure of the worker, it's the ad that does it, not the reading by Lisa!

Cola & Kyle raise the question of voice. The actual workers may be implied ("we're..."), but this ad was created by an ad agency, at the behest of the marketing offices of Pepperidge Farms, a division of the Campbell's Soup Co. It's a safe bet that no one associated with the creation of the ad has been within miles of an industrial oven, so it probably is overly optimistic (and maybe a tad naive) to worry about giving the workers credit for their attitudes toward the product. Lisa's reading of the ad works fine for me: they would much rather have us romanticize crackers (their wholesomeness, being a good parent, etc.) than think too hard about the actual production process or the profit motive.

(Now: don't bogart the crackers, friend.)

???? i'm trying to get images of disaters in totally automated factories---

sarge

I don't think Lisa meant to imply that low wage workers are "faceless assholes" as kyle took away from it. I read her sentance as pointing out that the company has larger aims of profit, and because we live in a capitalist society this means that workers are exploited, paid lower wages than their actual work is worth so that the company execs get higher salaries.. and being paid minimum wage to work in a production line factory (NOT a bakery) means that they most likely have other things on their mind that take priority (such as making they're paycheck last for the bills for their OWN family) rather than the nostalia-family that will recieve this message/be persuaded to buy the product. Her comment doesn't demonize workers, but is sympathetic to their reality of life. If you knew anything else about this website you'd see that overwhelming sentiment expressed throughout the posts.

My 6th grade students analyzed this add and decided that the objective is persuasion to buy their product, the audience is parents, the reason is because the product will make their children happy and healthy, the evidence is the "whole grains" and "cheese" and "no preservatives," and the emotional appeal is that parents desire close, happy relationships (see image) with their healthy children (see ingredients mentioned).

After looking at the ingredients list on a read bag of Goldfish crackers, they decided that it does have some healthy ingredients, but that it also has others that are not (can't pronounce them), so it is misleading.