More commercials like this please, and less like that stupid Dr. Pepper faux-ironic crap and the world will be a little bit better for it.
For a Swiss organization that helps people with disabilities.
Pro Infirmis Get closer. (by JvMLimmat)
Beer is brown. Apparently, this is a problem for me. It turns out that, as a woman, I require my beverages in a less threatening hue – like pink, which is the colour of a new “crisp rose beer” launching this fall in Britain. Animée is aimed at women, and also comes in white (clear filtered) and yellow (zesty lemon), because those are the colours of spring flowers, and ladies like flowers. It’s also less bloating, because ladies like skinny.
A rep for parent company Molson Coors said: “Women are an essential part of future growth for the beer industry and can no longer be ignored. We need to repair the reputation of beer among women by launching products that meet their needs.”
It’s true that women may be feeling a little alienated after decades of beer ads that present us as extras in Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher video or fun-crushing shrews who get between a good man and his brew. But our needs may not be met by alcoholic Kool-Aid in a soda bottle.
Emphasis mine. I love how marketing people think that just by making something sweet & pink, it’s now universally “for women.” But maybe, just maybe, the reason why women feel alienated by a lot of mainstream beer companies has something to do more with decades of misogynist advertising?
I know I personally don’t like supporting companies that constantly portray women as either arm candy or fun-killing wives that get between a dude and his beer.
Also? I, like many women, grew out of the pink-is-my-favorite-color-everything-must-be-pink phase when I was like 6.
If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
That’s Facebook in a nutshell. A place for friends, sure. But pull back the curtain and it’s a place for getting people ages 13 and over to willingly offer up the most direct ways to sell them things. It’s like being at a big party with all your friends but then realizing that the party is really a Pizza Hut focus group. And also, any pictures you take at the party are owned by the focus group forever. Sound fun to you?
Some people might try to defend these ads by saying they’re ‘making fun of sexism’ ironically… somehow. Advertisers must believe that the use of irony distances themselves from male chauvinism but that isn’t the case. While we think we are in on the joke, the reality is they aren’t making fun of or pointing out sexism, they’re doing it.
…Marketers love the uber ironic sexist style of advertising because they can use all the racist, sexist misogynist imagery they want and simultaneously distance themselves from it with a little wink and a nod.
—Retro Sexism and Uber Ironic Advertising (by feministfrequency)
Via Muslimah Media Watch comes a lesson in how not to advocate for women’s rights. This ad is from Germany’s International Human Rights campaign. Poster showing a woman in a burqa among trash bags The text translates to: “Oppressed women are easily overlooked. Please support us in the fight for their rights.”
It seems the folks who created this ad not only have a hard time seeing agency but actually went out of their way to erase it as thoroughly as possible and then stomp on it some more. And then equated women who wear the burqa with bags of trash. Literally.
“Please support us in the fight for their rights?” Please shove your support up your ass and get out of the way. Pretty sure Muslim women around the globe are too busy fighting for their own rights to deal with this paternalistic bullshit.
(via Agency is easily overlooked if you actively erase it)
Google has co-opted the It Gets Better campaign and turns it into an ad for Chrome.
It’s nice to give It Gets Better additional traction, and it’s neat to see a visualization of how the campaign evolved over time — but something isn’t sitting quite right with me about turning a successful grassroots PSA into a corporate promotion.
Google Chrome: It Gets Better (by googlechrome)
The Cliche Family in Television Land (via MichaelMartinTheShow)
A parody of 1960s commercials, made in the 1960s.
The ad is a perfect example of the way in which entirely-unrelated messages get inexplicably translated into half-naked women looking uncomfortable… Why in heaven’s name slather a perfectly clean woman in goop that looks like oil and make her crawl in a marsh? Because half-naked women who are dirty, disgusting, and uncomfortable are high-fashion. Because we love to see women on their knees in the mud. To a great extent, elite fashion imagery involves putting women in gross situations and pretending that it’s cool. These images assault their bodies and their dignity. So how else would an elite salon advertise its good-doing? Female punishment is the language of fashion. Fluid just speaks it fluently.
