Goodby, Silverstein & Partners Responds to the Firestorm over Sexist Milk Campaign

The day before yesterday, I wrote a scathing piece about the California Milk Processor Board’s new milk ad campaign, which features cartoonish men in varying stages of distress, with headlines such as “I’m sorry I listened to what you said and not what you meant,” and “I apologize for letting you misinterpret what I was saying,” and “I apologize for not reading between the right lines,” as well as a website that illustrates women’s premenstrual syndrome-related moodiness in the same way we once color-coded terror threats.

The firm who put this campaign together, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (hailed for the brilliant “Got Milk” campaign of the 90s), sees their “Everything I Do Is Wrong” campaign as a way to raise the awareness of milk’s helpful effect on the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome. It’s not a war on the sexes, they tell the New York Times. It’s a way the sexes can deal with it together.

I don’t buy it, and I wrote about it. Today, I got the following e-mail from an individual claiming to be an employee of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners … Continue Reading

Sex Toys Are the New Tupperware

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Despite the well-known adage that sex sells, anyone with something really sexy to sell knows how difficult marketing can get. Durex, however, seems to have found a medium for creating buzz with its house parties — events held at people’s homes for which the company supplies items for people to check out and take home to try. Think Tupperware parties… but a million times better. … Continue Reading

PETA Sacrifices Body-Image for Well-Being of Animals (Excluding Humans)

We find it humorous that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have no regard for the human animal — so what if we all develop massive body image issues, at least the animals are safe!

Their latest campaign, which pokes fun at the Transportation Security Administration’s new full-body scan measure depicts a security scan of a woman (all boobs, ribs and razor-sharp hipbones) in her bra and underwear, which reads: “Be Proud of Your Body Scan: Go Vegan.”
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We’re here to tell you that in moderation, you too can eat bacon and have a sexy security scan. Just kidding. We’re here to tell you that you’re beautiful just as you are. … Continue Reading

Not Making Enough? It’s Because Your Vagina Stinks

Oh, Woman’s Day, you’ve really gone and done it this time. Their October 1, 2010 issue features an advertorial (usually put together by the rag and a company’s brand strategy team) for Summer’s Eve, a company that makes personal care products for women, which suggests that the best way to get a raise is to make sure one’s vagina is squeaky clean.

You think we’re kidding, don’t you? … Continue Reading

Google Kicks Cougars Out

Earlier this month, the site CougarLife.com, which connects older women with younger men, got a bit of a nasty shock from Google. The search engine giant, which was receiving $100,000 a month from CougarLife to manage its advertising and place it on content pages, told CougarLife that its ads, which had been appearing since October, would no longer be accepted. The reason? Cougar sites are not “family safe.”

CougarLife suggested placing a different ad: instead of one picturing older women and younger men together, they proposed an image of the company’s president, Claudia Opdenkelder, 39, without a man in the picture. … Continue Reading

Menstrual Tweets — Really?

Not to fall behind Kotex in embracing open discussion of menstruation, Tampax has apparently launched MenstrualTweets, an aggregator collecting the Twittersphere’s 140-character missives about — you guessed it: cramps, PMS, tampons, cycles, and periods.

As with most aggregators, we’re seeing a variety of … interesting things.

No word from Tampax of yet as to this campaign. We’ll keep you posted. And, of course, you can go gawk at @MenstrualTweets on Twitter.

Can’t Say “Vagina” on TV

Kotex has decided to tackle ridiculous advertising for tampons with a brilliant campaign called U by Kotex.

This campaign is the first step for Kotex in addressing how we talk about menstruation and vaginal health as a society.

“Society has created shame and embarrassment around periods and vaginal health, which restricts honest dialogue and information sharing and compromises a women’s ability to take ownership of her personal care,” Aida Flick, Kotex brand director, tells Marketing Daily. “With the launch of U by Kotex, our goal is to change the conversation and to help women understand and be comfortable with their femininity and bodies.”

Not so fast, Kotex. Major television networks are banning the ad due to the use of the word “vagina.”

According to the Guardian:

Even when the company substituted “down there” for vagina, two [of the three objecting major] networks [which have not been named] still wouldn’t run the ad, so the company was forced to drop the idea altogether. That provoked Amanda Hess, author of The Sexist blog, to observe: “Now, the commercial contains no direct references to female genitalia – you know, the place where the fucking tampon goes.”

An executive for Kimberly-Clark, the owner of Kotex, notes that US TV networks have no such compunction about references to “erectile dysfunction” in prime-time ads for Viagra and Ciallis.

The New York Times reported that the campaign — produced by the advertising agency JWT for tampon brand Kotex — was “a bit too frank” for U.S. TV. Merrie Harris, global business director at JWT said: “It’s very funny because the whole spot is about censorship. The whole category has been very euphemistic, or paternalistic even, and we’re saying, enough with the euphemisms, and get over it. Tampon is not a dirty word, and neither is vagina.”

The video on this post is the amended version, which debuted on TV last week.

Information from the Guardian.

Durex Ads: Um, WTF?

Advertising commentators are all about this Durex ad campaign by the German designer Andrej Krahne, but we here at Sex and the 405 have a question: why is the woman made up of shiny happy words while the man is made of neutral or negative ones?

We hate to get all Jezebel on this, but just what message is Durex sending? That women feel no exertion during sex and that they exert no judgment or wisdom? And what’s with the fruits? Fruits? Really?

Let us tell you something, Durex — no matter how much we love sucking dick, we’re not thinking “happy, happy, happy, happy, happy” while administering a blowjob. Sorry to break it to you.

Oh, and we’re still confused about those fruits.

Images from Durex, via Penn Olson.

Love Thy Neighbor!

Most of the time, our editrix shuns the “go green” movement as a tool of evil to guilt us out of private jets and into commercial aircraft that treat us like cattle.

Every once in a while, though, a company will harness our fear of destroying the planet into a clever marketing campaign.

MeetLocals hit the nail on the head with this little ad. “Go green, date your neighbor.” If that’s not an automatic win, we don’t know what is.

Now all we need are some fuckable neighbors. Anyone else based out of the west side? Maybe we should join the site, but who needs to keep track of yet another site profile? These dating site people need to figure out how to do Twitter and Facebook integration so we can stop wasting time updating profiles all over the web.

Women vs. Men (The Pity Party)

We here at Sex and the 405 are mildly amused and also a little bit sad. At once. How uncomfortable. Below is the Dodge Charger Superbowl ad. Below that is “the female version” response.

The spoof response:

We have a choice, you know. We don’t have to do any of these things. We know, we know. It’s a bleak thing to consider not settling and never finding a partner. But isn’t being alone better than this? Jeez!

Via Mir.