Birthing a new brand and pushing ad boundaries

Sydney IVF, an Australian fertility clinic, is celebrating its rebranding as "Genea" with a commercial featuring a real human birth.

But is the baby union?

Tastefully filmed and edited, this film was created by Zia Mandviwalla from Curious Film in New Zealand and agency Rhodes Shapter. The unnamed mum is a New Zealander who consented to the intimate six-hour shoot because she was the veteran of two uncomplicated natural births and anticipated a low-risk third.



Some youthful or "childfree" viewers may have a squeamish reaction to this when it is broadcast on Australian TV, but I sincerely hope not. Anyone who has experienced or attended a birth knows that this ad represents something beautiful and essentially human. Not to mention something that none of us would be here without.

Bravo. 

FEMEN fight the privatization of the Ukrainian uterus (nudity)

Ukrainian surrogacy tourism. I didn't even know it existed. But a Google search brings up all kinds of services. For example, the top hit "La Vita Felice" offers:

- Selection of basing on psychological, medical, legal, age, ethnic, religious, financial and individual criteria; forming surrogate mothers database and giving it to the customers.

- Full range of the required legal services, help in preparation contracts and documents agreed with Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, embassies, civil registry offices, migratory service .

- Psychological diagnostics of surrogate mothers, psychological advice and support during the entire program realization.

- Translation of documentation in foreign languages, official legalization of translations.

- Qualified medical supervision – care and control of a surrogate mother during the entire pregnancy period.

- Railway- and air tickets reservations, meetings in airport and railway stations, booking rooms in hotels and other accommodation places.

- Continuous monitoring of all program participants, protection of interest of each participant, provision of strict observance of undertaken contract obligations.

The second (unsponsored) hit is Surrogacy in Ukraine, which tells us:

"Ukraine is one of a very few surrogacy friendly states in Europe. It does not limit surrogacy related payments and does not require legal procedures to obtain court order. No adoption of your own child is required. The recipient family creates embryos using their or donated gamets through IVF (In-Vitro Fertilization) that are transferred to gestational surrogate mother. Ukrainian law allows to issue birth certificate to intended parents' names regardless of their genetic links to the child.

In the legal history of Ukraine, there has not been a single reported case of a disputed custody claim arising out of a surrogate parenting arrangement or directly addressing the validity or enforceability of a surrogate parenting agreement."

Wow... this almost sounds like an industry. And according to FEMEN, it is.

"Skillfully manipulating the poverty, desperation and ignorance of women, the power of the mafia is trying to privatize the reproductive performance of Ukrainian women, building on this multimillion-dollar business.Ukrainian women for them the same product as the Donbas coal."

Which, of course, meant that they sent a protester in late-term pregnancy out to a train station to dress up in FEMEN's trademark floral headdress/no top and offer commuters a "baby for sale"...

Certainly, surrogacy is an important option for couples who are unable to have biological children otherwise. But do baby industries like these — especially in a country like the Ukraine, where poor women are already being enslaved by the sex trade and the "mail order bride" companies — turn women into mere commodities?

Thanks for getting our attention, FEMEN. You're actually making the rest of the world more aware of yours.

Sticky idea, or just plain gross?

Jamshop, an agency in Adelaide, Australia, came up with a rather disgusting way to get attention for their client in print. (via AoTW)

When the lads flipped through their latest issue of FHM, they found two pages stuck together at the point where a lingerie model was featured. Ewwww...

If they didn't drop the magazine out of pure disgust, and actually pried the pages apart, they were treated to an ad for the Repromed fertility clinic — and an invitation to take an online quiz to see if they qualified as sperm donors.

The punchline? "Don't waste your sperm".

We creatives often talk of discovering "sticky ideas", ones that grab eyeballs and beg to be passed on. These guys may have taken that just a little too literally.