Creative Skirts

Thank you, Richard Neill.

Last week Richard Neill left a pretty fantastic post on Bodyform's Facebook page lamenting the fact that while he was growing up, the company's advertising made women on their periods seem so happy and full of energy that he was acutally jealous. Now that he has a girlfriend of his own, he's realized this is all a carefully constructed roux. (He had 87,047 likes & 3,744 comments after 9 days.)

Bodyform retorted with some pretty great sarcasm of their own:

Hi Richard. We loved your post on our Facebook page. We are always grateful for input from our users, but your comment was particularly poignant. If Facebook had a “love” button, we’d have clicked it. But it doesn’t. So we’ve made you a video instead. Unfortunately, Bodyform doesn’t have a CEO. But if it did, she’d be called Caroline Williams. And she’d say this.

Do let us know if we can help you further…

Regards, The Bodyform Team

Fart consultant: Mike Koenig

 

After just 16 hours, it's already at 2,392 likes (full disclosure: one is ours) & 1,119 comments. Way to take advantage, Bodyform.

A pageant & ad campaign ahead of its time.

In 1941, the New York Subway System needed an ad campaign to draw attention to the ad campaigns posted in its cars.

"Miss Subways" ran from 1941 to 1976, and was deceptively ahead of its time. Other beauty pageants were still proudly featuring swimsuit competitions, but Miss Subway's bio always told of her career asipirations. 

 

Meet the 1st Miss Subways, writer and illustrator Mona Freeman:

And Frances Smith, Army Nurse:

And Helen Lee, Columbia grad and 1st Asian-American Miss Subways in 1949:

From the beginning, Miss Subways was lobbied by local groups to include black, Jewish, Catholic, Asian, Hispanic and even Scandanavian women. Racial integration happened fairly quickly, with the first African American crowned in 1948 (the news was so big, the NAACP magazine did a feature story). An African-American Miss America wouldn't be crowned for another 35 years.

Decades later when Marcia Kilpatrick was crowned, she had her skin darkened in her photo. “I looked too light; I didn’t want any confusion,” she said. 

That way, she said, “People can say, ‘That’s one of us.’”

An exhibition is running on the Miss Subways at the New York Transit Museum from October 23 - March 25. 

The History of Advertising by Women

courtesy of AdAge:

P&G Does Something Different

I grew up on P&G detergent ads. You know the ones. Kid gets messy outside, Mom comes to the rescue of kid's white t-shirt and throws it in the laundry with Tide, cut to stainlifting demo, cut back to smiling Mom and kid wearing saved white shirt. YAY.

That was a long time ago and not much had changed as far as I could tell--until this week. P&G is finally doing something completely different with their launch of Tide Pods. Frankly, it's not something I'd expect to see on American television. It's simple, fun, and isn't hammering you with product specs, nor does it feature a smiling family. According to the New York Times, P&G and agency Saatchi and Saatchi wanted to go out on a limb (imagine that).

I get excited about these things, and wanted to mark this moment in time and see if it represents a potential shift in the future of detergent advertising.

We can only hope.

 

New and shockingly interesting Weight Watchers work

Weight Watchers UK is doing something I find fascinating. Check out this headline:

What? Really? Even Weight Watchers is going the "gamification" route. To position a weight loss program as a game is absolutely intriguing to me--of course there are tons of apps and games out there that do this, but this is a huge brand with a long history, and I think it shows they have some guts. They even changed their URL to be "playweightwatchers.co.uk." I'm curious to see if women will respond to this, or if they'll think it's gimmick-y.

The second interesting thing about the new work for WW UK is the creative. They shot a music video of a song written specifically for the brand, featuring only women who have participated in Weight Watchers. It's pretty well shot and impressive that they got Regular Janes to do a decent job dancing and lip-synching. But even better, when you watch the video online, each woman in the video is clickable and you can watch an interview with her about her Weight Watchers experience.

Check out the video and interactivity at http://www.playweightwatchers.co.uk/.