It’s been awhile since I did a post on the trend in advertising campaigns to not just photoshop women in ads into skinny forms, but to literally make them physically alien and insectoid in their concentration camp images, as something that is supposed to appeal to women in purchasing considerations. And not in a SFF sort of approach where it’s deliberately supposed to be strange, but in ads where we’re supposed to consider them beautiful human woman who we’d want to emulate. If we had elongated spines that turned in ways human bodies can’t actually go.
Previously, these ads have not made much sense in terms of the elegant products they were pitching — upscale fashion, handbags, perfume. And that’s what struck me about them. But this time, it’s a product where skeletalization of the body is directly connected to the product — Diet Coke. That staple of acidic corn syrup and artificial sweeteners that the company keeps pretending starving models drink to look the way they do. Sales of Diet Coke are declining, apparently, (along with non-craft soda in general,) so Diet Coke has launched a new campaign called “It’s Mine” with women grabbing after bottles of Diet Coke now packaged in cutsey colorful graphics of the kind they put on kids’ plastic cups. (Including pink and purple!) That pretty much hits the trifecta: women are easily distracted infants, greedy harpies and obsessive shoppers chasing after purchases.
But it’s this image in particular that ultra goes for the stick alien look:
The dress of course is supposed to resemble Diet Coke itself in a sort of bottle shape. (Hey, they may even have the word “sex” in there subliminally.)
But the woman, oh where to start with the woman. First off, she has one hip that apparently can elongate and swivel outward from her body and around. Her upper torso can twist at a dramatic angle from her lower half, facing forward, while her other leg goes straight back sideways. (Maybe she does yoga.) Her arms are cadaverous and her fingers elongated. Her neck is also elongated, really giving the stick alien appearance, further enhanced by her blonde-ish hair which has been done short and appears in the photo as kind of spiky, in a manner resembling antennae tendrils. (You think they’d do curls for a soda foam resemblance, but I digress.)
She looks, in a word, kind of scary. You would not be surprised to see webbing or ichor or something coming out of her hands and snagging the Diet Coke bottle.
The photo is actually kind of a still shot from a t.v. ad that Diet Coke ran for the Oscars ceremony. (Hence, the ball gown the model wears.) But that ad uses CGI to make the woman’s body like pouring soda with the dress rather than human mobility, and then clearly the image was further photoshopped for print for graphic design reasons over human ones. (In the t.v. ad, when the model drinks the Diet Coke she has caught, her arms are not nearly as frightening.) The print ad is now showing up in various magazines.
Again, it’s one thing to do all the tweaking and glass polishing they regularly do to women in ads. (I can no longer recognize the faces of actresses on magazine covers because they turn them into life-size ceramic dolls.) But to turn a woman in-human, beyond skeletal, does this work to sell the product by just producing a striking image? Maybe it works for something like Diet Coke, but it seems again a fascination of photo editors indulging in surreal art. Rather than selling sex or elegance that might be desired, it’s wiping out the human woman from the image altogether into the otherworldly.
In any case, way to keep it regressive on the product re-packaging and sales pitch, Diet Coke. The soda still tastes awful.
Spam Confusion
I have not done a spam poetry entry in quite awhile because I’ve been getting nothing interesting. (Although, it seems the German spammers have found me and send me fake comments in German, which might have something interesting if I spoke German. My German flatmate in Scotland tried to teach me some German long ago but I am physically incapable of making the back of the throat sounds that seem to be required for proper speaking of the parts of the language that do not sound exactly like English words which were originally German words we borrowed or is the word Volkswagon.)
But I recently got a couple that struck me as worthy of exploring. The first one I think is a psychological test:
It’s true! I have been foregoing rest! But why would I force the children to make their own pancakes? How terribly heartless! And if I jump into the deep end of the binge pool, won’t I drown? Wouldn’t shallow binging be safer? (Note to self: entitle something The Deep End of the Binge Pool before someone else steals it. Also, possibly, The Shallow Binge Pool.)
The word salads of strange translations of disparate languages creates a wonderful kind of art. You should contemplate it next time you are forcing your children to make their own pancakes. (Note to self: entitle something Make Your Own Pancakes.)
But there’s a new trend in spam advertising commentary, one that eschews flowery word salad and existential insights. Yep, they’ve gone for a reverse psychology approach. It’s the Men’s Rights philosophy — insult your target and she will be yours:
This was of course attached to a post full of embedded videos from more than a year ago, not text by me, but no matter. The fact is that I am horribly, horribly chastened, yes I am, and I see nothing for it except to buy a designer handbag and sunglasses. Or possibly to just point out that such a bland insult is nowhere near as interesting as telling me how I should jump into a binge pool. And without waiting a half hour after eating the pancakes, so there.
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Tagged as advertising, humor, spam comments, spam poetry