Demi Moore appeared pregnant and bare on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. The image was both stunning and beautiful, and it drew a lot of attention.
In a meeting with advertising client Absolut, Vanity Fair proposed an ad for the vodka maker’s famed art series. In it, the iconic vodka bottle form would appear painted onto the back of a woman. The presentation even featured a live model, undraped to reveal her advertising-adorned skin. Absolut’s reaction? “You know how many letters we’ll get from the women’s movement? How degrading this is to women?” Vanity Fair countered by pointing out the positive response to the Demi Moore cover. Absolut’s people stood their ground, pointing out that there was a difference between editorial use of nudity and using nudity “in a commercial way.” That was nearly twenty years ago, so you’d think everybody would get it by now.
In the past few days, there has been a lot of discussion in the tech community about a video featuring a dancing woman wearing a tech company t-shirt and not much else. One woman says she emailed the tech company a month ago objecting to the video, but got no response. Last week, another woman tweeted her strong objections. She certainly got a response! A stream of tweets
called her unprofessional, her language inappropriate, and even accused her of damaging her employer’s brand. That brand was a CUSTOMER of theirs, how stupid could they get? In the end, the tech company made an unconvincing apology.
Absolut gets it, these guys don’t.
Among the many comments left on the many blogs discussing this, I took note of one from a man who says that if the video had featured a ripped man dancing in the t-shirt, that would not bother him. But it’s never, ever a man.
It also amused me to see any man in tech suggest that profanity equates to lack of professionalism. The tech community’s baseline vocabulary drips with profanity. I went to engineering school with army, navy and merchant marine men, and their language was angelic by comparison with what I hear at the average coders’ meetup these days.
The reputation of that company and the men who lead it has been damaged this week. If only these men had trusted one woman mentor or staff member or one male mentor or staff member who got it the way that Absolut gets it, they could have steered clear of this incident altogether. If only they would have taken the first email objecting to the ad seriously, they could have minimized the impact. Failing those, they should at least have known enough not to start telling off an angry, self-confident woman on twitter, but they didn’t.
I won’t say where their heads must have been, but it must be pretty dark in there.
