I recently got wind of some controversy surrounding Lincoln’s latest ad for their MKX luxury SUV that features Harry Connick Jr. driving through his hometown of New Orleans and talking about its rebuilding efforts. For those who haven’t seen the ad, click on the video clip below.

As expressed by a writer at Ad Age, the controversy centers on the question of whether Ford Motor Company (parent company of Lincoln) is exploiting the tragedy in New Orleans to sell cars and make some money:

[Ford] seems to have persuaded themselves somehow that they are doing something positive -- celebrating the spirit of a city, shedding light on its challenges, recognizing its heroes.

Bullshit. What they are doing is exploiting its victims to advertise luxury SUVs. It is vulgar. It is grotesque. It is disgusting.

And not even remotely surprising. With every catastrophe comes the inevitable sleazy marketing thinly disguised as sympathy, philanthropy, encouragement or public service. We’ve witnessed it in the wake of Oklahoma City, when Makita power tools took out newspaper ads ostensibly to honor the search-and-rescue volunteers but transparently to brag about donated merchandise.

After the Kosovo crisis, Philip Morris spent tens of millions of dollars to produce and air an elaborate spot recreating the refugee exodus, by way of patting itself on the back for airlifting about $150,000 worth of macaroni and cheese.

As an Asian American myself, I am certainly sensitive to cultural exploitation -- as I’ve written about before on my Asian-Nation site, in many cases where elements of traditional Asian culture are used to sell non-Asian products, almost always the traditional cultural meaning gets lost and the element almost always ends up being used as a caricature with little cultural meaning left.

But in other situations, it’s harder to draw the line between sincerity and exploitation. In the case of the Lincoln SUV/New Orleans commercial, my initial reaction was that generally, I did not find it exploitative. It certainly could have become quite exploitative if Lincoln had just shown their SUV driving around New Orleans without any mention or context of what the city has been through.

But in this case, Lincoln used a well-known resident of New Orleans (Harry Connick Jr.) and (I assume) pretty much let him speak freely and honestly about what the city is going through trying to rebuild. Sure, there were some “glamor” shots of its SUV, but I did not find them to be gratuitous or excessive. If anything, I found Visa’s commercial set in New Orleans to be much more blatantly opportunistic.

However, I am not African American nor a resident of New Orleans, so in the end, my personal opinion carries less weight than that of someone who was, and is, directly affected by the devastation that New Orleans endured.

With that in mind, the ultimate judgment about whether this Lincoln commercial is exploitative really belongs to those who are there in the city itself and who have been directly affected by its struggles. We need to hear more from them.