Tag Archives: advertising

Carbonated Beverages No Longer For Females

Posted on October 13, 2011 by | 1 comment

Most people have heard about the accusations regarding Coca-Cola and unethical practices around the world. While the most serious allegations [union leaders killed in South America1 ] lack concrete evidence, there’s one thing we can be sure of: Dr Pepper hates women.

That may be a little harsh and something I should explain. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a series of moving pictures to back up what I’m saying:

Dr Pepper Ten, a low-calorie beverage from the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, seeks to target the market of men who aren’t comfortable with drinking diet sodas. John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, reports that “Regular sugared soft drinks have declined in recent years, and some consumers have taste issues with some of the diet sodas.”23

While it’s not a bad idea to have an advertising campaign directed at men, Dr Pepper has gone quite a few steps past that by explicitly excluding women. Like most ad campaigns this one features a Facebook page. A page that can only be viewed if your gender on Facebook is male.

The image above is a pretty good look at that page. One of the many features is a “Manly Shooting Gallery,” as well as a corner for “Man-cronyms,” an example of which is G.O.L.F [Guys Outside Lady-Free]4

Suffice to say, people are upset. There’s been a definite backlash against the product’s ads, primarily from women. In response to these comments, Jim Trebilcock, EVP of marketing for Dr. Pepper, said that “Women get the joke.” The ads were trialed in six US markets prior to being released, and the women polled were not offended.5

The ad campaign does offend me, but not in the same way it does many out there. I’m perplexed and dismayed that this campaign was released in the first place, and that someone thought this would be a good idea. What sort of advertising seeks to cut out half of its possible market? Why was Deutsch LA, the ad agency responsible, thinking?

My guess is that this is all an effect of the  oh-so-popular Old Spice ads that starred Isaiah Mustafa. The proceeding commercials with the Fabio6 and the sea captain7 follow the same formula, and similar ads can be seen coming from other companies, Dairy Queen included. Dr Pepper appears to have tried to cash in on this craze, but clearly missed the mark.

1. If that’s something you’re interested in, here’s a link: .http://killercoke.org/

2. From the Associated Press: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DR_PEPPER_TEN?SITE=KFDMTV&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

3. I would love to read Beverage Digest.

4. My hatred for this stems from the fact that it’s not even clever. It’s spelled “acronyms,” not “ancronyms.”

5. From this article: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2116660/dr-pepper-draws-female-ire-facebook

6. That weird European guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie8yn2J08Qc

7. The coins eventually drowning the couple gets me every time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzowzUsq6iY&

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Slacktivism, or: Elisa feels bad about saying that philanthropy might not always be awesome

Posted on August 1, 2011 by | 2 comments

This New York Times 2010 article, which I think ends rather too optimistically, discusses two instances of the Red Cross’ use of Twitter to help raise funds from the US after a typhoon in the Philippines and the following earthquake in Haiti a few months later. After the typhoon, the Red Cross’ toll-free donation number was a trending topic on Twitter; the article says that thousands of people were posting it and asking their followers to donate – but, in spite of all of the Twitter attention, there wasn’t any noticeable change in donations. After the Haiti earthquakes, the Red Cross launched a similar Twitter campaign, but instead of having to call a number, people could just text a single word to a certain number to donate $10. The Red Cross raised 3 million dollars in 48 hours.

Beyond the moral and ethical questions about slacktivism, simple practical issues interest me: how much people’s altruism increases in relation to its ease, if distanced giving lets us avoid the overwhelming sense of incompleteness and unending need that often comes from volunteering or working for charities in RL…

And yeah, social networking has done wonders for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to communicate or have a way to organize themselves – the election protests in Iran, for example. But I’m talking about things like the hunger site, where you go to their adful page and click a button to give “the value of 1.1 cups of food” to feed the hungry (also, now, to support education, veterans, abandoned pets, mammograms, the rainforest…), or care2.com, which has a similar “click once to give” thing as well as a “Petition Site” which literally has a “Today’s Hottest Petitions” link on their home page.

It seems like each separate out-of-borders emergency or consistently-in-need-of-funding-issue has a random YouTube video’s chance at viraldom to make it in to the public’s consciousness long enough for us to donate to it.

Yeah, every dollar that’s made via slacktivism, either the free advertiser-supported kind or the donate-easily-via-texting kind, does work. But the satisfied well-that’s-my-good-deed-for-the-week feeling that such distanced altruism gives is worrisome, because it instills a conclusive, complacent feeling that will ultimately be the death of any culture’s drive towards public service and philanthropy.

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Posted in bizarreness, money

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