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Anyone else think that there's an uptick in gender-provocative advertisements recently? Adidas has now hired a biological male as a women's underwear model, with chest hair and a distinct bulge at the groin:
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1658934499118309379
https://www.adidas.com/us/pride (It definitely is classified as women's swimwear)
There was also that other now-withdrawn Miller Lite beer ad where the woman spends her time swearing and professing how happy she is to compost images of women in bikinis. Just recently, we had the original trans beer ad that has proven very damaging to Bud Light.
Is this kind of advertising increasing, or are people noticing it more, or am I making up a trend? I suppose one could conceptualize a waves and troughs model, as advertisers tone it back after boycotts (Gillette comes to mind as having suffered from its choices). Some have argued that Gillette took an immediate and serious financial penalty from the ad, 350 million in six months. On the other hand, there have been arguments that P&G, Gillette's owner didn't suffer in the medium term, or at least that there's too much noise to tell. They stood by their advertisement choice. Perhaps merely being aggressive towards gender roles is much less risky than promoting trans.
Or maybe the conservative response to these ads is essentially random? I never heard that Gillette made another trans ad in 2019, that all got subsumed by the toxic masculinity ad. Thoughts and theories welcome.
Heckler & Koch had a bit of a social media manager oopsie earlier this week piggybacking off of the Miller Lite ad. The since deleted tweets have been replaced by something more on brand for ze German weapons company.
As much as I, a guy, would agree with deemphasizing the use of "bunnies" and booth babes, this definitely was not the play. Also doesn't help when you can probably dig up evidence of women willingly leveraging their sexuality and blending it with certain interests as a profession, which is just ammo against the scolding (pardon the pun).
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There's a quote on that.
Mostly a joke but there's something to it..
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I was hoping for a funnier apology than a picture of a photoshopped road sign. Ah well.
H&K is normally perturbed that people who aren't a national army wants to give them money. They are very boring Germans and not Austrian or Belgian or Swiss.
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As one reply mentions, this is the first time a company openly acknowledges the nature of their mistake (identity politics) rather than tip-toeing around the issue.
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That adidas page is wild. I'm impressed by a company that is ostensibly selling fitness products and products with their image tied to fitness electing to advertise using people that are the complete opposite of an aspirational appearance. Presumably, the basis for this is that fat people buy shorts too, but I'm just kind of amazed that an apparel company would ever want to associate their image with people that are physically grotesque.
People made similar augments about Nike's embrace of fat acceptance yet the stock has done really well.
Adidas is not a luxury brand anymore so association is not that important . For this reason it's not like you will see ugly people in Prada ads.
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Advertising is weird. Tucker Carlson had 1% of the entire US population watching his show every night, but nobody wanted those eyeballs.
It's not weird, we just need to abandon the idea that companies actions are exclusively market-driven.
Yeah. For some reason, people seem to hold the axiom that corporations "maximize shareholder returns". There is not much evidence to believe this is actually the case.
Once you drop that axiom, things make a lot more sense.
Here's a better axiom:
"Companies are run primarily for the benefit of people who run companies."
The point about market mechanisms though is that they don't depend on all individual managers/employees being relentlessly profit driven, rather the point is that eventually less efficient firms will be driven out. Now, of course I accept that this is not a perfect mechanism, especially once they get large firms will have a certain inefficiency carrying capacity that they can manage without losing their position, but in general I think that it's safe to assume firms try to maximise profits unless there is compelling evidence otherwise. There is certainly precedent for controversial culture-war adjacent advertising campaigns being a success. These things are hard to gauge but it does seem that Nike sales increased in the wake of the Kaepernick advert controversy.
This is a good point. In the short term, companies are run for the benefit of insiders. But in the long term, only profitable companies can remain in the ecosystem. The long term can be very long though. The era of zero-interest rate policy from 2008-2022 allowed a lot of zombie companies to stick around who should have been victims of creative destruction.
Another thought: Perhaps wokeness works the same for companies as it does for individuals. Those businesses who are thriving (Google, Disney, Nike) can afford to waste resources signalling wokeness. Those businesses that are only surviving (most local businesses, Bud Light) can't afford to piss off their customers with woke nonsense.
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This doesn't work once the co-ordination problem is solved. If all firms can be similarly situated, or enough punishment can be brought to bear on firms who choose the more efficient rather than the politically correct solution, the market can be defeated. That's how Carlson ends up making no money for Fox despite being popular, the big ad agencies are all politically aligned against him.
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That's where ZIRP comes in. Productivity growth went to zero once ZIRP started...
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And their failsons and faildaughters who need some sort of sinecure to show for their expensive miseducation.
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I mean it seems obvious to me that the mulvaney ad was an attempt to claw back the lion’s share of the underaged drinking market by appealing to presumably liberal zoomers. They didn’t anticipate anyone over 30 even seeing it.
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The vast majority of advertising spending accomplishes absolutely nothing. I've worked in senior Marketing management and it's hilarious how bad attribution and tracking actually is.
As a result, to survive and prosper as a Marketing-type you've got to be seen to be doing things, and this kind of provocativeness is perfect. Any 'old heads' within your industry who question it are whatever-phobic resisters of change, and if the campaign fails you're simply before your time.
I often find myself wondering why brands that already have complete saturation in terms of awareness and a dominant position in their respective market bother with ubiquitous marketing campaigns.
Coca Cola, for example, is so utterly ingrained in U.S. (and other country's) cultures that they could basically run a 3 second ad with the logo that said "You know who we are." and it'd have just as much impact as some Oscar-quality short film.
I do assume that marketing successes are measured on a power-law standard. Most ad campaigns won't be particularly successful, but sometimes you get one that takes off and produces crazy outsized visibility and cements the brand in the public culture for years to come.
So marketing budgets are devoted to hunting for that one big hit, even if most of the money is 'wasted' in the meantime.
I am partial to the theory that advertising works by establishing a shared understanding of what consuming the product signals to others. It explains many puzzling behaviours, e.g. why Coca Cola would bother with ads – they want to steer how other people will percieve you when consuming their product, not necessarily create awareness or an immediate desire.
In that framework, the Mulvaney backlash makes perfect sense; the blog post I linked even talks about how brands generally don't have different messaging on different platforms since it would be directly counterproductive to the idea that you want to establish a common product image. InBev didn't understand it, tried different messaging for different groups, and is now suffering the consequences.
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Because companies that get to the size of Coca-Cola are very risk averse. They have a good thing going and don't want to ruin it. And the prevailing (though mistaken) sentiment in business is that advertising is basically a magic wand to increase sales, no matter the circumstances. Combine those two things, and you get companies like Coca-Cola wasting money on advertising because they don't want to deviate from the popular wisdom and risk negative effects. It's incredibly stupid, but who is going to stick their neck out by cancelling all the ads for a quarter or two to prove that the expenditure is wasted? It's like the old saying about "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
I mean, I hear what you are saying. But that makes it all the more bizarre when they run advertising that tells me I'm a piece of shit, this message brought to you by Coca-Cola (or Gillette, or Miller Lite, or Bud Lite, or Disney, etc). I don't see risk averse behavior there.
Pepsi has long found social justice adjacent marketing to be a way to pull share from the monster Coke. They were featuring endorcements from Civil Rights leaders like Ralph Bunchie in their ads decades ago.
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2rafa is correct. People need to be reminded when it comes to consumable products, even if initial brand awareness has already reached complete saturation. It's happened to me multiple times where I'll see a commercial for Wendy's or something and I'll think "you know what? That sounds pretty good. I'm getting Wendy's today."
This would work if they were advertising some new or returning product that I wasn't aware of previously.
And with fast food, there's a lot more aggressive competition for consumer dollars than I'd say there is with Coca Cola. Getting someone to pick Burger King over Taco Bell over Chik-Fil-A does actually involve messing with their preferences in that instant, I'd guess.
Not to say there's not competition in the beverage sector, but Coke's presence there is fundamentally secure. At least, secure in a way that can't be easily unseated by a competing marketing campaign.
I'm more surprised by advertisements for Toilet Paper and such other everyday items where there's minimal variability between the products. Is there enough spare money to be seized by keeping a particular brand of shit tickets on people's minds?
Getting someone to pick Taco Bell over Chikfila, ceteris paribus, is clearly a deeply intrusive warping of preferences.
Yeah, but you can't get Chik-Fil-A on Sundays.
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I'm about ambivalent between the two options, probably slightly in favor of taco bell. But if someone was talking up Chick-fil-A it would probably change my mind.
I'm at Chick-fil-A once a week or so, I don't remember the last time I was at Taco Bell. Does dine-in vs drive through change your preference?
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And I'm not so sure.
Coke is in movie theaters, restaurants, convenience stores, and vending machines everywhere. Just because they're not advertising does not mean that they're invisible.
Pepsi might gain a percentage point or two but I literally have a hard time imagining a longtime Coke drinker swapping to Pepsi under those circumstances.
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Is it? Everybody I know who drinks soda is a habitual soda drinker. The same way I start my morning with coffee, they slam a Coke. We'd go out for lunch from the office, and they'd order a Coke. If the person said they only had Pepsi, they'd sigh and begrudgingly have a Pepsi instead.
I mean I guess you have to hook them into that habit at some point. But I've never known anyone in my entire life who sporadically consumed Coke when an advertisement finally got to them. In much the same way as I've never seen a smoker who needed an ad to compel them to smoke.
The moms who buy Coke for their kids know it's bad for them. They don't buy it because of the ads. They buy it because their shitty kids can't act right unless they get what they want, and what they want is a Coke.
This actually makes me wonder, how much of Coke's ad budget is directed at children. That would make a ton of sense.
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This makes absolute sense to me if I'm currently, e.g. sitting down in a movie theater and they want to make sure I am reminded of how thirsty I am and that the refreshment stand serves cold Coke products.
But beyond that, I'm surely questioning whether ubiquitous coke ads are 'worth' the 5% increase in the chance of me buying a coke that day. I don't pretend to know better than the company itself, but do we honestly believe that is Coca-Cola stopped actively advertising altogether for a month or more that there'd be a substantial drop in sales?
I'm not sure I do.
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Coke ads make perfect sense to me, for just that reason; television (and streaming, on the cheap plans) car ads are what I find confusing. I'll spend a dollar on one drink vs another because of a whim, but if I'm spending tens of thousands of dollars then I'm doing research for months first, and that's the time to hit me with a few targeted banner ads to make sure I don't forget a particular car model on my list to investigate. Is it just that TV ads are still the only good place to put video, and the "look at our car smoothly whooshing through windy mountain roads" video genre is so important for building buyer interest that car companies have to put up with spending wasted impressions on vastly more numerous non-buyers?
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Part of it is probably to keep an upstart from even having the option to use mass market advertising. If the slots are all taken it's tough for a new entrant to join in the market. Same reason there are 50 varieties of toothpaste it fills the asile so there's only a couple brands available.
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It's Pride Season. You see Christmas themed marketing sometimes as early as October, Easter starts in March, so it stands to reason Pride marketing starts in May.
It was really strange to me when last year, I noticed straight friends of mine had started referring to pride month as if it were a real holiday. Like saying what they're doing for pride month, etc. I never thought that people would actually buy into it, but it seems that it's happening.
This is called 'winning' for the LGBT coalition.
San Francisco, 2022. A middle-class household.
Timmy: "Mom, Dad, I'm gay."
Mom and Dad: "We still love and support you. Do you need a ride to soccer practice?"
I'm not personally against people coming out to parents as gay and parents supporting them, which is what your scenario looks like to me. I'm more afraid of what I personally feel like I see, which is at least low key incentivization, by celebrating it so heavily. It's as if people want to act like being gay is an actively good thing. It's not, in my point of view. It's just nothing. Neither good nor bad.
This South Park clip comes to mind:
https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/ef0mtp/south-park-we-heard-you-re-gay
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