I was wrong to title my earlier post about last year’s We are Animals ad campaign from Wrangler How not to Sell.
It appears that not only do women’s corpses sell, but, according to judges at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, they also scream “raw sex”.
The Wrangler campaign has picked up the top press award at the highly prestigious ad festival, with David Lubars, the president of the Cannes Lions press jury saying:
It is a very emotional campaign, you can see how it can go into all kinds of areas. The theme is we are animals, a very primal, sexual approach. Before the brand was about middle-aged cowboy jeans from America. Now it takes a whole different look overnight.
No, there’s nothing different about this look David; it’s just the same old same old don’t-women-look-great-when-they’re-dead-or-when-they’re-caught-in-the-headlights-looking-hunted misogynist shite.
According to today’s Guardian article, US judge Gerry Graf, the chief creative officer at Saatchi & Saatchi, said the campaign “Screams raw sex.” And “That’s what you want when you put on some jeans.”
I don’t know about the rest of you, but images of women floating face down in rivers are probably the last thing I want to be reminded of when I slip on my jeans of a morning. But then I’m not a hip and trendy middle-aged white male advertising executive so what would I know eh?
I wonder if Steve Wright, who left the body of his first victim Tania Nicol floating in a stream, has got a copy of this allegedly dead sexy piccie stuck up on his cell wall……..
Too Much To Say For Myself 
Stuff like this makes me ashamed for my industry. (I work as a graphic designer at a small creative agency)
You wouldn’t believe some of the misogynistic stuff I have heard from clients and other advertising agencies.
Just at the beginning of this week we had a meeting with a client regarding a horror product. This client went on about how liked the “Drag Me To Hell” poster campaign because it was “all about her being raped” and she was “being dragged down to be raped” and blah blah blah. Could we do something like that?
Luckily, my company is quite progressive. We will not be doing this or anything like it. We have a million other horror ideas that do not involve rape fantasies. I’m working on one right now.
I hate my industry so much sometimes but I like working in it because I think I can do it better.
This reminds me of the Duncan Quinn adverts of last year – link possibly triggering.
Wrangler jeans are shite though. And all the dead bodies in the world won’t change that.
Yes, there’s a whole genre of eroticised dead women in media and other gigs and I not sure if it’s a recent phenomena or not. I’m thinking of America’s next top model a couple of years ago which featured Images of ’dead’ women, a lot of whom looked as though they had met a violent end and a PSA for drink-driving not long after that. And then the Duncan Quinn ads and loads more at the ’Sociological images – seeing is believing’ site over the past year or two.
Worshiping at the fetishized alter of female-death? Strangely enough it’s also bringing to mind the video-recorded images splashed all-over the western media of Neda Agha-Soltan in the Iranian demonstrations as she lay dying.
Yup, this is from America’s next top model – ’07
http://www.zap2it.com/news/custom/photogallery/zap-photogallery-antm8-crimescenevictims,0,698280.photogallery?index=2
I think what frustrates me so much about this genre is that I just don’t get it. I mean, porn, prostitution, sexual violence, although I’m totally opposed to them at least I have some understanding of what’s behind them, and what peoples’ motivations might be. But this shit I really can’t comprehend.
I can’t get how someone can look at any of the pictures people have linked here, and the Quinn ones Caroline’s put on her blog, and think to themselves “Wow, fantastic image”.
They’re images of dead women ffs! How can they be attractive to anyone, or sexy to anyone but a fucking necrophiliac?
If someone can explain the psychology or whatever behind this or recommend some reading for me I’d really appreciate it.
‘Cos I’m well and truly flummoxed.
I’ll hazard a guess that it’s a strong category of media textual power – one in which the dominant group [men] have power over women, and how this power is, in turn, projected through media texts. The role of the media is central here in naturalising gender hierarchy, which is implicit in the way this genre is structured. To apply a very basic semiotic analysis: this genre’s “indexed, connotation code (albeit arbitrary as is all textual analysis)” reminds women of their mortality; particularly at the hands of men. This, of course, also includes the ‘snuff-movie‘.
On a related note Mary Daly says.
“The fact is that we live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic “civilization” in which men collectively victimize women, attacking us as personifications of their own paranoid fears, as The Enemy. Within this society it is men who rape, who sap women’s energy, who deny women economic and political power”
Of course, why it’s deemed as “sexy” is another story. Daly wrote about this in Gyn/Ecology, I think it was.
Well to repeat what I said on t’grauniad, the campaign isn’t even working.
VF Corporation, which owns brands including Lee, Wrangler and Vans, has cut its annual sales and earnings forecasts, after net income dropped 25%to $100.9 m (£68.5m) over the first quarter of 2009.
Once again, you are seeing what you want to see here… the x time of images of abused women.
No, the people in the pictures aren’t dead. They just mimicking animal behaviours, like a salamander or crocodile for instance. And no, I’m not saying that women are crocodile either okay.
You don’t have to see your enemies (as in anti women?) in everything around you.
If you want to fight this, get out of your own circle otherwise you only be mocking around against each other and you will change nothing.
Even more, maybe the success of this campaign has been helped by you.
But it hasn’t succeeded. Wrangler sales have fallen. And even if it had, it’s very unlikely that it happened because it was mentioned on a feminst blog.
Talk sense, eh?
“Even more, maybe the success of this campaign has been helped by you.”
I just threw out my Wranglers, because they have less cred than the three quid jeans with ‘George’ on the label.
They were innocent of the photo-thing, they got tossed for not being Levis
jennifer ruth!
lets set up the feminist ad agency you talked about on the f-word once. i have moved out the ad industry now, i was made redundandant but i used to be in tears almost at the blatant sexism i had to put up with, including one incident where a very senior member of staff said to me and a colleague that “we’d probably seen a lot of cock in our time”.
i hate the way the industry uses sexism in such nasty and stupid ways,. because a lot of the sexism in advertising is exactly that – stupid and infantile and only has the purpose of enforcing damaging gender norms and stereotypes.
luckily i was made redundant before i would have had to work on a XXX rated video site. nice.