The Good, the Bad, and the Unremarkable

Current trends in advertising

Advertising has always done a strange dance with the culture: sometimes leading, sometimes following, but the two are always inextricably linked. Lately, this fact seems truer than ever. There are several events taking place in the industry these days that can trace their roots to current cultural phenomena – for better or worse. The following is a look at a couple of these high- and low-lights in the biz – and where they originated.

On the positive side, one trend follows advertisers enlisting the efforts, tactics and ideas of conceptual artists like David Blaine. Blaine has made a name for himself by being something of a modern-day Houdini.
His exploits include everything from confining himself in a glass box over the Thames river for 44 days and nights to standing atop a 90-foot tower in Bryant Park in Manhattan for 24 hours without a safety net.


Target department store was quick to seize on the trend by hiring him to promote their two-day sale by giving him two days to escape from a spinning contraption five stories above Times Square. The event
was considered to be a tremendous marketing success and generated a lot of publicity in the media.

Another instance of an advertiser taking influence from an artist involves Adidas and conceptual artist Phil Hansen. Hansen recorded himself painting a portrait of North Korean ruler Kim Jong Il with 300cc of his own blood and posted it on YouTube.

The tactic was then seen in an advertising campaign from Adidas for the New Zealand Rugby “All Blacks” team. Adidas’ agency TBWA/WHYBIN created a limited-edition poster that not only featured the players,
but also included each player’s blood, which was thoroughly sterilized and then embedded into the paper during the printing process.


Sales of Adidas “All Blacks” apparel went up by 24%. All 8,000 posters quickly sold out. In fact, many are now traded on auction sites around the world for around $400 and rising. It was featured on TV news
programs, in The Wall Street Journal and other international newspapers generating millions of dollars of editorial comment; not to mention – hundreds and hundreds of blogs and sites.

On the less positive side, the portrayal of women in advertising has always been a controversial topic in the industry. And while the old advertising bromide “sex sells” seems to be repeated nowadays only with a healthy dose of irony, we all still see ads that portray women in ways many don’t appreciate, either intentionally or not. A recent TV spot for Heineken featuring a robotic blonde beauty pulling a mini beer
keg out of her abdomen seems to be the “offender du jour”.

What’s new here, however, is the way some in the industry are choosing to shed light on the problem. 3iying is an “all girl creative agency” based in New York City. Their mission is “to make better ads,
products and media for other girls”. They asked young women to point out ads they didn’t like because they found the message particularly insensitive to them. 3iying compiled the results into a video mosaic that provides a fascinating look at a highly targeted demographic responding to advertising that was aimed at them – and missed.


One video critiquing a print ad for Absolut vodka caught my eye. In the video, a young woman holds up an Absolut ad that features a man and a woman facing the camera. The woman is beautiful and elegantly
dressed, holding a drink. The man stands beside her – poorly groomed with a bulging, obviously pregnant, stomach beneath a frumpy sweater. The headline reads “An Absolut World”. What offended the young
woman was the way the pregnant man was portrayed – how he struck such a stark contrast to the elegant and sophisticated woman – that, in effect, being pregnant was shown to be un-fun, unglamorous,
and undesirable.

What I find interesting is that the ad was surely intended to have just the opposite effect: to give a nod to women, to poke fun at gender roles and stereotypes. But even with the best of intentions, the effort appears to have been handled a little too cavalierly for some. It’s a lesson all of us in the advertising industry should be mindful of.

Tom McManus Creative Director, Cheil, NAHQ