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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There was also that other now-withdrawn Miller Lite beer ad where the woman spends her time swearing and professing how happy she is to compost images of women in bikinis.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.
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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