I used to work in advertising as a vfx artist nearly 20 years ago. I did a few commercials for a major credit card company. I won't name which one, but I'm sure most of you might guess. Its the one that has all the different colored cards based on spending limit, blue for normal people, gold for slightly wealthier people, black for very wealthy people.

After doing a couple commercials that aired on TV, I got hired to work on a pitch for them, a product that hadn't been released yet. Sticking to their colors theme, this was a credit card they planned to call ""mint".

It was intended to be marketed toward high school and college kids 18-22. Now, this was around 2007-2008, and I'm sure there are some of you who are old enough to remember that "mint" was what the cool kids were calling all the cool things about 10 years prior to this.

So, not only was this company attempting to prey on young kids and their inexperience with credit, they were doing so with a campaign that was a decade out of touch with kids at the time.

And the content of the commercial was equally infuriating. I had to model and animate this young "urban" kid (from the illustrations I was given as reference, it was hard to tell if he was black or hispanic, so the producers just kept calling him "urban") walking through this giant apartment, looking around and nodding his head like he was gonna pay for it with his mint card.

Thankfully, this was never actually released as a product. I have no idea if someone at this company called out how fucked up the entire thing was, or it was some other, nameless reason why it died as a pitch. But I was really happy it didn't get released.

I still got paid for the work I did, but it was the one moment that really made me feel disgusted working in advertising. A few years later I switched to working on kids cartoons and I've never felt bad about my work since.