Honda dealership under fire for sexist rink ad

Image via Teri Pecoskie

Apparently, this is an ad that the Henley Honda dealership in  St. Catharines, Ontario, saw fit to put in front of the visitors' bench at the Meridian Centre, where the Niagara IceDogs play.

In Canada. In 2016.

Using sexism to troll opposing teams has a long tradition in sports, including painting visitors' locker rooms pink. But how regressive do you have to be to use feminine imagery to insult male athletes in the 21st Century? Especially as more and more women play, watch, and love hockey and other sports.

The advertiser didn't just make an honest mistake, either. This is how they reacted to criticism on Twitter:

The Protein World reference is telling. But while Protein World and Gourmet Burger Kitchen are brands appealing to a narrow demographic of young people, Honda is a major brand that depends on selling to all walks of life. For the Honda brand, sexism by a rogue dealer is simply bad business.

Thanks to Justin for the tip!

Update:

Montreal cinema owner inflames Twitter with "Hockey Widow" promo

If there's one Canadian stereotype that has a strong basis in reality, it's not weird pronunciations of "out" or niceness — it's an obsession with hockey. The game is deeply rooted in our culture. While not every Canadian is a hockey fanatic, it's safer to assume a Canadian has a favourite hockey team than a favourite type of poutine.

Which makes it all the more baffling that a cinema chain in Montreal, "the Mecca of Hockey," would so casually insult female Habs fans by running a women-only promotion for "Hockey Widows" on game nights.

The CBC has compiled a collection of Tweets about the issue, including cinema owner Vincenzo Guzzo's defensive non-apologies.

@HamJam_9 Where is the insult? She isn't naked or in sex cloths or mopping the floors or doing other steriotipical BS thing that we see...
— Vincenzo Guzzo (@Guzzo_Vincenzo) October 14, 2014

@JessRusnak Wanted to reward women. Anything wrong with giving a benefit to women only? Maybe Senior discounts should also be given to all!
— Vincenzo Guzzo (@Guzzo_Vincenzo) October 14, 2014

Oh well. Canada's women's national ice hockey team has won gold in the past four Olympics, and is one of the winningest teams in history. So I guess it will take more than a sexist local cinema promotion to turn Canadian women away from the game.

Molson Canadian scores Canada's favourite viral image of the moment #anythingforhockey

Via Molson

Go Canada!  #OurTeamCan

This ad will restore your faith in advertising, sports and humanity

Copyranter shared this on Buzzfeed. The Chicago Blackhawks beat the Boston Bruins to take the Stanley Cup in game 6 of the finals on Monday. While they held a massive victory parade in Chicago, they also committed the time and money to pay tribute to the spirit of Boston after the awful marathon bombing this spring. This was a full-page ad in Friday's Boston Globe.

Hats off to you, Chicago.

Travel campaign offers a brutal take on mob mentality — but is it for real?

The submission on Ads of The World says "JWT, Gurgaon, India" but I have to give the J. Walter Thompson Company the benefit of my skepticism. The campaign is courting controversy in such a ham-fisted and immature way.

Above, the Vancouver Stanley Cup Riot (mistakenly labelled "Football Riot") stands in for what Charles Mackay coined as "the madness of crowds". As an ad concept, it's tenuous at best, contrasting the idea of "individual travel plans" against mob mentality.

But the creative team of Bobby Pawar, Priti Kapur, Sayantan Choudhury, Sumeer Mathur
and Sumonto Ghosh didn't stop there.

They decided to go after American anti-abortionists:

Dog fights:

Toddlers in Tiaras:

Gun obsession:

And racism:

Pretty ballsy social commentary, but what does it have to do with selling travel? All I get out of it is that Indian tourists should avoid North America at all costs. (Interestingly, Chariot India "journeys of discovery to India, Nepal and Bhutan, in South Asia," so maybe that was the idea all along.)

To me, this is another example of belief in the stupid old adage that there's "no such thing as bad publicity".  There is... for brands. It's the creative teams and agencies that really benefit from these "edgy" campaigns, as the ad community congratulates them for convincing someone else to pay for another self-serving attempt at notoriety.

Ottawa Sun co-opts Aboriginal rights meme to welcome back NHL hockey

My sister-in-law, Bonnie, sent me this picture of The Ottawa Sun. Now that the NHL lockout is over, most people here are happy that hockey is coming back. Less happy will be the thousands of aboriginal rights activists for whom #idlenomore has become an important and passionate call-to-arms.

Sexist ads about the NHL lockout in 3... 2...

...too late. It already happened.

This one is from Crown Royal's Facebook feed. It camed with the caption, "Anyone else cry into their glass of Crown when they heard lock out news? This pretty much sums up how we feel."

Although if you blinked, you would have missed it. It was almost immediately taken down from the public feed. It lives on, however, in their photo albums.

Why is it a problem? This is Canada. Hockey counts many, many women among its fans here. And they're just as hardcore as the men.

In fact, when the CBC launched a "woman-friendly" sports streaming site called "While the Men Watch, " and angry fan noted, in an editorial in Maclean's magazine:

Jaclyn Garfinkle, a 23-year-old sports fanatic and an associate producer at TSN’s Off the Record, thinks While the Men Watch is grossly “miscalculated” in its assumption that women don’t know about sports. “I think it’s somewhat ridiculous,” she says. “I think females in Canada are really underestimated in terms of how much they watch hockey.”

Women play hockey here, too. And they're good at it.

The whisky brand may be trying to appeal to a male audience, but it's too bad they have to do it with such outdated ideas about men and women. Appealing to some guys' anti-arts sentiments at the cost of angering female sports fans just doesn't seem worth it.

Happy Canada Day!

It's a day off, so here are a bunch of YouTube videos that give insights into Canadianness:

























Please feel free to add links to other videos in the comments below, eh?