This morning I checked my email, just to find out I had received several International Women's Day emails from various brands. One, in particular, made me emit a strange, snorting sound - something in between a laugh and an affronted grunt. The email was offering me a discount for a manicure. Because, you know, you might have dirt under your nails after spending the last few centuries digging your way out from under patriarchy.

Here is a general tip: if your business profits from the standards imposed on women by society, that is fine. Businesses are not people with consciousnesses. But marketing teams are. Please abstain from communications on this specific day of the year, or, at least, have the decency to not lean on the struggle of women throughout history for your comms. To clarify - this is not a celebratory day when we all drink champagne and have pillow fights. This is a day when we acknowledge hundreds of years of hustling to obtain the right to vote, the right to education, the right to not be sexually harassed (OK we are still working on that one) and other freedoms and rights that edge us ever closer to that priviledged space of unquestioned existence currently held primarily by white men. We do not want flowers and free shipping, we want equality.

If equality isn't truly one of the core values of your brand, you have no business communicating explicitly on these issues. You do, however, always have a responsibility to look at everything you put out in the public space, or directly in someone's inbox, and reflect on if you are are a part of the problem. Manicures in themselves are (fairly) neutral - how you choose to communicate about them is not.

Here are 4 things you should be doing (and that will improve your business, as well*):

1. Review your core values - are they implicit in the supression of women? Maybe you can tweek them to, well, not be. You can sell me lipstick without insinuating that I am nothing but red lips for the male gaze, and you can sell shower gel to men without implying that manliness is equal to having drone women swoon around you. Be smarter than that.
2. Review your segmentation and targeting - is it relevant to attribute certain properties to  target purely on the base of gender? Or are there smarter ways to make sure you are relevant, such as rational/emotional drivers, interests, income brackets?
3. Review your messaging - just make sure you're not actually offending your intended audience. This sounds like a given, but given the amount of distasteful and insulting messages that reach me in my inbox, my Instagram feed, in public spaces, it is clearly not. 
4. Read. Or watch Youtube, if you prefer. Find out about the male gaze and the sexualisation of the female body in society. Learn about the causality between dehumanization and abuse. Consider how representation and gender stereotyping affects our minds and our society. 

Here is a little something to get you started:

The hottest thing on the advertising circuit at the moment is this campaign for Lacoste X Save Our Species, the Lacoste/International Union for the Conservation of Nature collab, created by BETC. Whoever thought of this brilliant collaboration to bring the tennis brand positioning out of the collars-turned-up-in-the-country club space to young, fresh and woke, is a genius.


Above, an illustration of the brand repositioning.
Clearly, A+ for execution. I am considering buying a polo shirt for the first time since the nineties, and I find the 150€ price tag reasonable because I like animals, and the little rhinoceros speaks to me (he says "help, there are only 67 of me left!").

I have nothing mean to say about the above campaign, but it does make me think of the exploitation of super cute animals (so, all animals) in advertising. Let's have a little look, and a discussion about the pink unicorn in the room.


NORD DDB created this campaign featuring the doge meme and got a lot of traction in social media, and were even reported to Reklamombudsmannen (RO) for being racist towards Japanese people (due to the origin of the Shiba in connection with the bad grammar) which gave them additional PR. The campaign was finally freed of the allegations. I think the dog is the real star of the ad here but I also find it a bit lazy to take a masterpiece collectively created by "the internet" and lean so heavily on it (see also: Zlatan, Rihanna).


These ads for Pedigree Dentastix were created by BBDO. Seeing as the ads are trying to sell you a healthy snack for dogs, I cannot consider this exploitative. These dogs are trying to get owners to buy snacks that are good for their teeth, and therefore helping all dogs. They are heroes. And because most owners look like their dogs, I think this really works.



This Nutri Balance ad crafted by Y&R is truly good-looking, and perhaps a bit too premium-feel for dogfood, but my main objection is the messaging here; I would argue that the owners are the bad one's in the story told here, and it seems petty to blame the dogs. Admittedly there is a lot of storytelling in a single image, and the comedy is pretty solid so again, kudos, Y&R.

The ad has nothing to do with the text below. It is just a good ad by Saatchi&Saatchi Stockholm for Gainomax.

If you are in digital, chances are you are acutely aware of the 3-second rule. If not, this is the gist of it: if your page or content takes more than three seconds to load, more than half of your visitors will have already gone ahead and bounced right out of there. Basically, the general public has the attention span of a poorly disciplined circus monkey.

The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that a few years ago, those three seconds were five, and in the 60s, a TVC was basically as interesting as the tv-show it interrupted. This was obviously due to the lack of choices, a luxury we no longer have. But I imagine that with an ever-diminishing tolerance to wait even the briefest moment before moving on to the next shiny object, at some point, we are going to have to come full circle. Remember when a small cellphone was the coolest thing you could have? Remember that tiny Motorola flip phone that everyone flipped out about?

One thing I really can't wrap my head around: gross branded edibles. If you are going to brand something that people are meant to enjoy, why would you choose something utterly unenjoyable?

I was having a perfectly uneventful day when around the 4 pm mark I found myself feeling a bit peckish. I considered the rice cakes in my drawer but I wanted something better, so I made a little foray around the office, checking the fridge, making eyes at a large jar of Nutella (a jar I had already had my proverbial fingers in earlier the same day), and finally came upon a small selection of strange sweets on a shelf. This is normally where one will put some kind of "authentic" snack brought home from a vacation to share with colleagues, or leftovers from a meeting with clients, or other things that are free to grab. Among them were these small, fancy candy-like pastries with a brand on top. I casually took way to many then it would be considered polite to and went back to my desk.
As I bit into the first one, I immediately realized that something was wrong. I had forgotten to remove the wrapper. I checked. In fact, I had not forgotten to remove the wrapper. It was simply a really, really vile pastry-like candy. As I swallowed the dry piece still in my mouth and threw the other pieces in the trash, I got to thinking.

Why would a brand choose to have something like this produced? Mind you, I assume there are several people involved in this simple project of choosing and purchasing sweets - target lists (I mean, someone sent this to our office), budget decisions, research, contact with suppliers, getting an estimate, presenting to a client (unless it is done internally, in which case the "client" is probably like the office manager's boss), making a decision and finally providing the supplier with the logo and... well, there should have been many moments in the process where someone could have raised their hand and said "hey, guys, how about if we went with something that doesn't have the taste and texture of paper?..."

I remember being part of this specific type of process several years ago. Someone put a dozen little bonbons in a selection of different flavors in front of me and asked me which ones matched these three separate brand-in-brands. The flavors varied from lemon (tasted like a cough drop) to mint (ditto) to spearmint (you get my point here). Exactly none of them had what I would be looking for in a branding product - you know, appeal. I mentioned this and two weeks later there was a large bowl of different cough drops wrapped in cheap-looking branded wrappers in the office.

Plenty years later I had a client in the automotive industry with whom I had regular meetings in a large conference room in their carpeted offices. As time dragged out and peoples voices were distorted into that low alien slo-mo effect I would absent-mindedly stretch out my hand and pick up one of the caramels in the bowl on the table, popping it in my mouth and, five seconds later, pretending to scratch my leg so I could pick up the cheap, branded wrapper I'd discreetly thrown on the floor under the table and spit the lemony little devil out in it. Not half an hour later this exact thing would happen again. I also saw colleagues do the same thing. The worst part of it is that the client must have thought they made a good decision when buying the damn sweets, as the bowl would be half empty every time we left.

The little boxes of sweets, anything with a crinkly wrapper, anything that pays more attention to the clarity of the logo than the actual edibleness of the product, anything that has no flavor, no visual appeal, no sense of opulence or sumptiousness... if your brand is not premium, or aiming for a premium feel, you don't need branded edibles. If you are going to a fair, just offer people brownies (not special ones, unless it is that kind of fair) or something store bought. A nice bite is more memorable than a logo on shiny wrapper - you should be doing the talking anyways. Unless you want your brand message to be "eat shit", consider your choices when acquiring branded candy. If you cannot provide an enjoyable moment, maybe go another way this time.