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There was also that other now-withdrawn Miller Lite beer ad where the woman spends her time swearing and professing how happy she is to compost images of women in bikinis.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