Introduction

Current marketing strategies from for-profit companies have experienced a shift in their commercial advertisements that look quite similar to public service announcements. We refer to these so-called commercials as public service advertisements (PSADs). In the nonprofit sector, public service announcements (PSAs) are designed to inform as an act of altruistic concern, but this form of benevolence has been usurped by for-profit companies for traditional marketing and branding purposes. For-profit sector PSADs include campaigns in which a company uses images with a story-like narrative arc containing some act of corporate altruism to showcase its products available to consumers. These PSADs often include the storyline of whom we refer to as underresourced communities, especially minority children from impoverished communities, portrayed as the beneficiaries of these for-profit companies’ genuine concern for structural inequities disproportionately felt by these mostly Black and brown bodies depicted alongside the sponsors’ sporting equipment or appliances, for instance. Rather than an act of corporate heroism, these ads serve as a largely predatory-like attempt at commodifying the most vulnerable in American society for increased positive brand recognition paid for by the philanthropic arm of companies that now function as marketing departments with absolutely no ability—or intention—to help solve the effects of structural poverty many times perpetuated by the very same companies’ policy positions for which their governmental affairs divisions lobby Congress.

We maintain that such PSADs that tell the stories of these underresourced children are well-intended but naive in their desperation to actually help adults, including concerned coaches and teachers, repurpose and reinforce stereotypical images that harmfully conflate being poor with somehow being in need of sporadic volunteerism for making these kids healthier and cleaner. Our project for this essay is theoretical: to propose a vernacular alternative for storytelling to the dominant, ideologically informed kind, particularly in the increasingly important and democratic realm of social media. This could, perhaps, help wrestle away proprietorship over the imposed narratives in the commodified characterizations peddled by disingenuous albeit savvy marketing executives positioned as philanthropic do-gooders. Specifically, we advocate for the consideration of a pragmatic reorientation toward viewing and interpreting—and then ultimately rearticulating—messages, both about and from those underresourced persons, that intersect the narratives of health and the rights-talk concerning accessing healthrelated services or products and being healthy.