Are Bob Marley and Barack Obama products of people overcoming racism?

Via Ads of The World

This Brazilian anti-discrimination campaign caught my eye, because Bob Marley has always come up when I argue with people about the social construction of "race". Bob's father, Norval Sinclair Marley, was ethnically English. His mother, Cedella Booker, was Afro-Caribbean. Bob grew up in his mother's culture, however, and was committed to the Afrocentric Rastafarian religion. As far as Bob Marley was concerned, he was "black". But he acknowledged his background this way:

I don't have prejudice against meself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't deh pon nobody's side. Me don't deh pon the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me deh pon God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

In this way, Bob Marley is a good physical symbol of overcoming prejudice. Especially since he had to deal with racism from both of his ancestral communities.

Via Ads of The World

US President Barack Obama's background is well-known. His father was Kenyan, and his mother Anglo-American. He was raised in his mother's culture, and actually faced the preposterous question of whether he was "black enough" to represent African Americans. At the same time, his presidency is viciously vilified by white American racists who can't stand the idea of a black president.

Using a "mixed marriage" as a symbol of overcoming hate is interesting, because the present debate over marriage equality for same-sex couples frequently draws comparisons with the days of anti-miscegenation laws.

Via Twitter

In my great-grandmother's day, even marriages between Catholics and Protestants were considered "mixed". That gives you some idea of how far we've come.

But where I wish we would go is to the post-racial world, where people are identified as humans belonging to diverse cultural groups, rather than being labelled based on the external (and genetically minuscule) climate adaptations that give us the racist categories of "black", "white", etc.

One love.

Can social media shaming change behaviour, or is it just Schadenfreude?

I've written quite a bit about how shame is not an ideal motivator in social marketing. But there's another aspect to shame and attempts to influence behaviour that is vigilante — rather than institutional — in nature: public surveillance.

My Osocio colleague Claire shared a Tumblr called "I Hope Your Bag is Comfortable, Asshole" that attempts to shame Toronto public transit riders out of the cardinal sin of avoiding a seat mate on a  full bus or train by blocking the empty seat beside them with a bag.

It's an interesting strategy, although I'm not sure it will work. Not just because of legal and privacy concerns, but also because it seems more like revenge punishment than rehabilitation.

This is just one of many name-and-shame Tumblrs. Public Shaming documents awful Twitter reactions to the Steubenville rape case. Hello There, Racists! documents another type of hate.

But is taking pictures of people in public to shame them fair, or even legal?

It brings to mind the case of Adria Richards, the "Company Evangelist" for SendGrid who tweeted a photo of two men at a PyCon conference to out them for sexist public comments. Not only were they fired, but she was too. The company said in a release, "Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line. Publicly shaming the offenders – and bystanders – was not the appropriate way to handle the situation."

The big problem with photos, as opposed to Tweets, is that Twitter is a public medium. Information shared is deliberate, and the statement stands alone without need of context (or, if a response, is attached to the context.) A photo can tell a skewed story, because it lacks context.

The hope is that, to avoid being busted in this way by social media vigilantes, people will behave better in public. But is the answer to minor social ills really to be found in spying on each other?

This vintage ad illustration makes photoshopped ads look realistic by comparison

Retrogasm recently posted this old Jantzen girdle ad from the 1940s. 

Here are a couple more, via allgraphically.com (the second is fromt he '50s):

Portraying unrealistic body types in ads and fashion is nothing new. The difference between fashion illustration and manipulated photos, however, is that it is easy to mistake the latter for reality. 

The impossibly long and slender ladies in the ads above can more easily be dismissed as cartoons.

Ralph Lauren ad, via Photoshop Disasters

Via ynaija.com

Miu Miu ad via The Frisky

And that's the problem with digital image manipulation: It lets impressionable young minds believe they're looking at reality, rather than fantasy.

Jantzen was originally a swimsuit company. It's interesting to note that its ads for swimwear around the same time celebrated the way it exaggerated "curves":

via allgraphically.com

Here, the hourglass shape (itself a challenging, if more biologically useful beauty ideal) is the thing. And once again, it is exaggerated.

And it still is...

Via Joe Crazy

Vanessa Paradis explores the domestic jungle for H&M

I like this new ad for H&M's "Conscious Collection" of more sustainable clothing.



Just because you have signed on Vanessa Paradis to be the face of your collection doesn't mean you have to focus on her sex appeal. Instead, this ad is a beautiful piece of eye candy for corporate social responsibility. The parallax-effect scrolling web site is also quite lush.

H/T The Drum

You didn't really expect Heidi Klum to eat that burger, do you?

We all know that food advertising uses all kinds of fakery to make the product look as appealing and we're supposed to imagine it. But Heidi Klum's fake bite and chew in the new Hardee's/Carl's Jr. ad is a little unsettling.

Was she even in the same room as the burger? Did she use a stunt mouth? The Jim Beam Bourbon Thickburger, by the way, packs 870 calories and 45 grams of fat.

I don't think I've seen a bite that weird since V:

The sex-themed burger ad is the latest in a series, although this one is less cheesecake and more goofy parody. (Of The Graduate, in case you are culturally impoverished.)

More about their ads here.

Via Ads of The World

Maybe this ironic contextual ad placement is a good thing

This was supposed to be a post about something else. Over the weekend, Twitter user @mazface posted  a picture of a card for sale at a British Halmark store that seemingly ripped off the sexist "demotivator" parody poster above.

The Demotivators meme has been around for years. A company called Despair Inc. sells hilarious parodies of those cliché motivational posters that showed up in offices and gyms back in the '90s. It's a very old joke, but for a decade or so Despair Inc. has also allowed users to make their own demotivational posters using a generator app. Just like with meme generators, by giving anyone the ability to create professional-looking captioned images online, it has become a default medium for making and sharing jokes of varying quality.

So anyway, if Hallmark is selling cards printed with a stolen, sexist, and rather weak joke, that's shameful. But let's get back to the screencap at the top for 500Motivators, which came up in a Google search for the source image.

Because I Am A Girl is a global campaign to promote gender equality in the developing world by supporting the provision of education and resources to girls in need. I really like this cause. I've written about their Canadian ad campaigns, and my son sponsors a girl through the program. 

The fact that BIAAG Canada's Google ad was served up on this site isn't particularly remarkable. But that it appeared above this particular image is.

You could call it a contextual "fail" —  I won't. The internet is full of this garbage. But seeing an ad for a girl-positive movement in such a space reminds me of activists and social workers who brave wretched hives of scum and villainy to provide a positive message of hope. 

Girls are the answer. Not only to poverty, but also to the internet's obsession with women as sex objects.

Could Lululemon get any weirder?

Via Lululemon

The ad above ran a couple of years ago. Yoga people seemed to like it. But right now, the Canadian stretchpants empire is in big financial trouble over a massive recall of black yoga pants that showed even mo' than toe.

"The truth of the matter is, the only way that you can actually test for the issue is to put the pants on and bend over," Christine Day told analysts on a conference call in which executives were repeatedly grilled about the pants debacle and the company's quality-control process. 

"Putting them on themselves does not solve the problem," she said, adding the pants made of the company's signature black Luon fabric had passed a series of standard quality metric tests and felt normal to the touch. "It has to be engaged in a four-way stretch for the sheerness to appear. It is a very complex thing to test for."

In case you haven't heard, the pants are reported to become transparent in certain positions. But the "bending over" quote isn't the first questionable PR thing said by company executives.

Business Insider has compiled a list of weird facts about Lululemon, starting with founder Chip Wilson's explanation that the company owed its success to the birth control pill. Not for good reasons, mind you, but because the pill created a world in which women worked, became more stressed, tried to dress like men, and lived unhealthy lives that resulted in breast cancer.

Almost overnight, women went from 20% to 56% of the university population.  By the 1990’s, Super Girls were finishing university where they excelled at school and sports.  They then entered the work force en masse and tried to figure out how to compete in a 12-hour-a-day competitive job market and have a functioning family.  Rarely did the two reconcile which created, and is still creating, an inordinate amount of stress on women today.  Fortunately, there is a direct correlation between education and health.  Super Girls knew that the best way to combat stress and sickness was to create natural endorphins found in athletics. 

Breast cancer also came into prominence in the 1990’s.  I suggest this was due to the number of cigarette-smoking Power Women who were on the pill (initial concentrations of hormones in the pill were very high) and taking on the stress previously left to men in the working world. 

In 1997 or so, yoga emerged as an activity that was both accessible and non-competitive for its participants.  It showed up at a time when women recognized the benefits of decompressing and living in the moment.  Yoga provided the same great feeling as snowboarding or surfing but could be done in an hour and a half and close to home.
Ultimately, lululemon was formed because female education levels, breast cancer, yoga/athletics and the desire to dress feminine came together all at one time.  lululemon saw the opportunity to make the best technologically advanced components for the Super Girl market.

Here's something Chip said about child labour:

According to those who attended BALLE BC conference, Wilson told the delegates third world children should be allowed to work in factories because it provides them with much-needed wages. They also say he argued that even in Canada there is a place for 12- and 13-year-old street youths to find work in local factories as an alternative to collecting handouts. 

"I look at it the same way the WTO does it, and that is that the single easiest way to spread wealth around the world is to have poor countries pull themselves out of poverty," 

And then there's this:

Some say that the recall, despite plunging Lululemon stock, is also providing priceless earned media. Could be. But when more and more people peer into the depths of this brand, what will they see?

Update: The answer to the question posed in the headline is YES.

American Eagle posts ad for spray-on skinny jeans

Tip/Photo via Buzzfeed

It's not April 1 yet, but the gags are starting early this year.

American Eagle has dedicated part of its site to the skinniest jeans possible: spray-on body paint.



Pretty funny stuff, but somehow I doubt the men would not be able to pull of the look as sleekly as the women.

"It's our skinniest fit yet and is so comfortable you'll feel like you're wearing nothing at all."

Points for being "cheeky" with a hint of PG sex, but being fairly tasteful and gender balanced about the shenanigans.

The most disturbing car ad starring Silvio Berlusconi you will see today

Via Ads of The World

Ball gags?!? This is part of a bizarre campaign, by JWT India, for a Ford with lots of trunk space.

The other executions show Michael Schumacher with rival drivers tied up in the back, and Paris Hilton having kidnapped the Kardashians.

Really weird and disturbing. I'm surprised the Ford brand is good with this.

Update: The ads were really created by Ford's Indian AOR, but were not ever approved.

Ford and its ad agency issued apologies for a tasteless Ford Figo ad — in which former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi is shown with a bunch of gagged and crying women in the trunk of his car — that was never meant to see the light of day. 

It turns out a young creative team at JWT India, Ford Figo's agency of record, made the spot and posted it to website Ads of the World without approval. (It has since been removed.)

Ford and WPP Group (owner of JWT) have nonetheless issued formal apologies.

Update 2: Not just the work of renegade creatives, apparently. Adland writes that "Bobby Pawar, JWT India's chief creative officer & managing partner, as well as Vijay SimhaVellanki, creative director at Blue Hive, a WPP unit dedicated to managing the Ford business, have been asked to resign."

Advertising rape culture in anti-rape campaigns

Victim-blaming. It's ugly, it's hurtful, and it's doing nothing to stop people from raping other people.

In the aftermath of the Steubenville rape trial, in which two teenage men were convicted of raping and humiliating an unconscious teenage woman, it's time we had another look at what these supposedly-helpful ads are saying. 

Using some of the post-verdict, victim-blaming Tweets compiled on Sociological Images, I've twinned the infamous ads with their real-life counterpart messages.

The ad above is from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. I wrote about it on Osocio, and it was all over the mainstream media. The ad was pulled from the campaign.

This one is from West Mercia police. When called on it by British feminists, they refused to apologize.

This one isn't even about drinking. It's a "safe taxi" campaign by Transport for London, and note that it has the Mayor and the police endorsing it.

To quote You Are Doing it Wrong: 

Christ. Did anyone pause for even a milli-second, and think, ‘Gee, maybe it’s NOT such a good idea to equate not booking a taxi with certain rape?’. Or did the advertising agency just convince Cabwise that it would provoke attention, and controversy?

Which brings us to my longtime prohibition-era nemesis, MADD:

MADD - Unbuttoned from Esparza Advertising on Vimeo.

Interestingly, when the message is being preached to men, the danger isn't being raped but rather having unwanted sex with somebody unattractive:

It's really bad, folks. People actually think that the only thing standing between a woman and her rape is how she controls herself. She must at all times be sober, fully covered, aloof and safely cloistered away from "bad people". Failure to observe any of these rules makes her responsible for anything violent that happens to her, because men — especially drunk men — have no control and will automatically seek to sexually violate her.

There is hope, however:

Sexual Assault Voices Edmonton, via Osocio.

Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland, via Osocio

Via Men Can Stop Rape

Teach your children well. 

Vintage ads showing women as trophy kills

I recently caught this ad on Sociological Images' Twitter feed. While vintage ad sexism is easy enough to find, I'd never seen this one before. It lives on the site for Lucky Tiger, a men's grooming products brand, and Time says it's from 1957.

Apparently, taxidermied women was a thing in the 50s. This one is quite well known:

Via Retronaut

But it was still going on in the '70s:

Via Fashion Rat

Hunting metaphors have long been part of the culture when it comes to "courting", but taking it to its logical conclusion is beyond bizarre.

Microsoft shows some love for equal marriage

More evidence of the sea-change in marriage rights for same-sex couples that has taken over the United States. Although I can't help but note that it's probably a lot easier for the "mainstream" to watch two beautiful women kiss each other than two men. But anyway, baby steps.

Here's the ad:



Ad by Deutsch NY. Tip via Business Insider.

Berlusconi, Bush and Kim Jong-il compared to tenacious turds

The ads are for Bisalax, a laxative. The English translation of the copy says "Don't let it overstay".

These nifty ads are by Artplan in São Paulo, Brazil. North Korea begins bombing in five minutes...

Via Ads of The World

KFC is still assuming women's job is to cook for men and children

Pic via this blog

Some of you might be old enough to remember when Kentucky Fried Chicken was spelled out in full, and its food was positioned as an alternative to home cooking that would give women a break from their cooking duties at home.

Even when more and more women went to work, the ads continued to assume that it was a mother's duty to take care of dinner:



Personally, I thought those days were over. But apparently not in the chain's UK and Ireland operations:

Via Condescending Corporate Brand Page

Last Sunday was Mother's Day in Great Britain, also known as "Mothering Sunday":

Mother's Day, or Mothering Sunday, is now a day to honor mothers and other mother figures, such as grandmothers, stepmothers and mother-in-laws. Many people make a special effort to visit their mother. They take cards and gifts to her and may treat her to brunch, lunch or high tea in a cafe, restaurant or hotel. People who cannot visit their mother usually send gifts or cards to her. 

An important part of Mothering Sunday is giving cards and gifts. Common Mother's Day gifts are cakes, flowers, chocolates, jewelry, and luxurious clothing. Some people do not give a physical gift, but choose to treat their mother or grandmother to a special meal, beauty treatment or fun outing.

Or a bucket of grease. 

E-bikes marketed to environmentalist stalkers

I did not know this was a desirable target audience...

Via Ads of The World

Multilevel Marketing a homophobic sausage fest

Are you man enough to host a themed party for your bros that's been described as "Mary Kay on Steroids"?

Welcome to the world of Man Cave, a company that promises to help you reclaim your man card by inviting your man friends over for beer, brats and manly games like oversized Jenga blocks and Hammerschlagen.

Yes, really.

From the site:

How It Works.

1. Organize home parties for guys called MEATings (at other peoples homes).

2. Guys eat, drink, and be manly while Guides showcase legendary Man Cave products at MEATings.

3. Guys place orders and Guides earn great money - 25% commission.

No B.S. Guarantee.

A company made so simple even a guy can get it. No hooks. Period.

Men are dumb, you know? And we're also definitely not gay. The "no homo" vibe permeates one of Man Cave's main pieces of MEATing collateral, the "Man Laws":

No man shall ever turn down free beer... for any reason. Never. Ever. Seriously, Never.
Grilling, regardless of weather, is always the first choice for cooking.
Hiding your beer in the fridge is strictly forbidden. Besides...sharing is caring.
A man should never be denied the right to adjust himself or place his hands down his pants under any circumstances.
A man should never tell another man that his zipper is down. It's his own damn problem and you never looked "there" to begin with.
A man may be seen tearing up only when:
A. His first child is born (and it's a boy),
B. he has received a devastating blow to the groin,
C. Carmen Electra is unbuttoning her shirt...scratch that, your shirt.
While at a sporting event, you must walk "B to F" (BUTT TO FACE) when leaving your seat. This is so you do not miss any of the cheerleaders' performance (since you obviously never get up to pee while the ball is in play).
No man shall ever cancel plans with his buddies at the last minute. Exceptions: You win free tickets to the Super Bowl, Carmen Electra is unbuttoning your shirt, or in cases of death (your own).
If you are placed on the Jumbotron at a sporting event, you are to offer a simple wave or raise of your glass. Acting like an idiot is strictly forbidden. A man should act like Barry Sanders... you've been there before and will be there again - show some class. Exception: You have more body paint on than clothing. In that case - go for it.
A man is permitted to build his "Man Cave" in anyway he wishes. However NO "Man Cave" shall ever include: A fridge incapable of holding a case of beer, "Fat Free" potato chips, and any variation of the color pink.
A man purse is still a purse.
The following skills must be mastered by all men prior to death: making a bonfire, playing some form of poker, replacing a flat tire, throwing a spiral, and the ability to pick up laundry with one’s feet.
If a man leaves his chair for a refill, his chair is not to be touched or claimed by anyone. If he does not return by the end of the commercial break, assume he has gone missing or been killed. You can call the police when the game is over.
No man shall shave his chest hair. Exception: he is an Olympic swimmer. In that case – he should shave his entire body, win the Gold medal, and make America proud.
When settling a dispute physically, all forms of contact are permissible (pushing, wrestling, tackling), EXCEPT any direct blows to the groin. This is the un-manliest of tactics and should be saved only for defending oneself from more than two opponents or more than one wild animal.
A man must read sports news at least once per day, if not multiple times per day, to develop thorough knowledge in order to win any sports related arguments that may arise at any given time.
Official manliness is judged by these five traits: chest hair length, total horsepower owned, biggest fish ever caught, number of cheeseburgers eaten in a single sitting, and complete dedication to all Man Laws.

Got it, bro? This has nothing to do with selling crappy beer and sausages to your friends while hitting nails and bonding in a totally heteronormative way. We're talking about protecting the very essence of manliness here.

Tip via Cracked