Reseeding a male approval needle: Editorial Wonderzine on advertising Reebok
Yesterday, the Reebok brand unveiled the campaign #NiKakieRamkithe heroines of which were the creator of the telegram-channel “Female Power” Zalina Marshenkulova, European champion in wrestling Anzhelika Pilyaeva and MMA fighter Yustyna Grachyk. Photos of the heroines were accompanied by various slogans, from courageous ones like "Change from the needle of male approval to a man's face" or "When they say" carry it on my hands, "I can imagine how I am carried in a coffin" to calmer ones - "Daughter of my mother's friend" and "I don’t finished it. "
Advertising caused a wave of indignation in social networks - especially users did not like the hint of face siting. A few hours later, Reebok deleted three posts with campaign photos and instead of them made one, from which some of the slogans had disappeared. “Unfortunately, after the publication of some pictures, it became clear that part of the content could not be published on behalf of the brand according to the age policy of the social network. Nevertheless, the publications are still available in the campaign heroine accounts,” Reebok said. Revision Wonderzine ponders what the Reebok campaign and reaction to it tells us.
Julia Taratuta
Chief Editor
Now we can say for sure that the “female” agenda has won other events in recent weeks. The social networks did nothing but discuss Gillette's repentance and the limits of what is permissible in Dow, and Zalina Marshenkulova and her joke about faceting have squeezed geopolitics and the president of Russia in the top of Yandex. Pragmatically speaking, this is good news. Questions of ethics and gender rights are no longer optional - now this is almost mainstream.
The joke pulled out by the heroine from her own twitter is not the wittiest thing I have heard in my life. And certainly she is far from the sexual revolution - you can talk about sex more and more. Someone has already reminded the author that there is not much courage in the “provocation” itself - it fully echoes the standard male fantasies.
Someone in it heard the aggressive imperative, someone - the struggle for power, and not the desire for equality. A promise to face your partner is an invitation to pleasure or an attempt to humiliate? Opinions are divided. Talking out loud about cunnilingus is, of course, useful, but is it necessary to be rude?
If you are a woman and find out the relationship with a system that treats you very badly, you can speak sharper or softer, it is a question of habits and taste, but you cannot sound ominous and authoritarian, even when you say “We are the power /" Women's power " because in the absence of real power it is no more than an energetic slogan.
So I don’t see much crime in the campaign. In a society where women’s long-term relationships with advertising are well described by the Belarusian New Year’s Pine for a penny creative (we are talking about buying pine), a strong and independent female gesture always claims to be an event. Your body - in every sense of your business, as you would like to tell us Reebok. But the Russian management of the company cannot survive even a day of its own courage, punishing the creative group for having previously endorsed itself.
The problem with this advertisement (remember, women's sportswear) is not for me that it turns the stereotype or sows violence, is not written in the best syllable, is unaesthetic or sounds like a threat. It seems to me that she still appeals to men - choosing words for them, annoying, provoking admiration or resentment. Again, women have no place here, and they unmistakably feel this - after all, this has already happened many times.
Ksenia Petrova
editor of growth and distribution
I like the jokes of Zalina and the joke about faceting in particular. We are constantly in the editorial office and among friends are joking in the same way, and I consider the talk in the spirit of “fu, so to speak ugly” to be a bigot. Most people joke about ass, boobs and sex - not always politically correct and not always successful, but what can you do. Many Russian women really sit on the needle of male approval (otherwise the instagram would not show me advertising shugaring and fingernails, and my boyfriend promoted business training and the “school of great books”). This is all so clear that even boring - and our readers just do not need to explain the details.
The problem, in my opinion, is that the joke from Twitter, taken out of context, and, moreover, repeatedly repeated, loses its meaning - for those who do not know Zalina, they are not familiar with her nuclear style of presentation and memes about dominance from the channel power ", the advertisement looks weird. In the Reebok campaign, the message does not read not only a wide audience of the sports brand, but also a narrow stratum of feminists, who might like to talk about the needle of male approval. And the audience of Twitter and feminist telegram channels is no surprise with this joke, for several months already. It is indicative that this is not the first unsuccessful attempt by Reebok to sell sneakers and sweatpants with a feminist slogan - just a few months have passed since the release of the scandalous campaign about “diversity”, where three slender girls told about body hypotheses.
I don’t think that it will somehow affect the “image of feminism” and “discredit the movement”: commentators who considered feminists to be fools will think haters gonna hate. Moreover, it is also unlikely to affect sales of Reebok. Burger King with his "see not aggravate" lives and well. Most of all I was surprised that so many people have and express an opinion about the campaign - as it turns out, little is needed to blow up the Russian-language Internet.
Sasha Savina
editor of the "Life" section
It's great that today we have the opportunity to discuss feminist advertisements made specifically for the Russian market - it seems, about five years ago, there was simply nothing to discuss. A corporation that thinks about the fact that women are a huge part of their clients, which means that their interests should be taken into account, is always encouraging. It is good that the brand is trying to adapt the campaign for the Russian market and is working on it along with the heroine, who openly declares that she is a feminist.
One can argue how successful the decision was to use these phrases as slogans for a long time. It seems to me, not at all - first of all because the phrase, successfully looking as a joke on Twitter, to a wide audience of Reebok, most likely, will seem strange, incomprehensible and inappropriate. Plus it is not related to the sport. Of course, a huge part of the pro-feminist campaigns of sports brands is built around strength and self-confidence, which are not always directly associated with it, but here, in order to see the connection, you have to take an extra step (“Cover your nipples so you don't cut yourself” - thanks to a sports bra? ).
But all of these are rather details: there are many around me to whom the campaign seemed successful and witty, and each has its own arguments. The main thing that I want to pay attention to in this situation is how the corporation behaved when faced with the first negative reaction: the photos with the most daring slogans were deleted, leaving only “safe” like “My body is my business” or “Oh, Not all!". It seems to me that if you come up with an active feminist position and a bold advertising campaign, you have to go to the end, otherwise everything looks very insincere (especially considering the history of the brand’s September campaign). The main thing is that after the very first failure of the brand they were not afraid to act further - otherwise nothing really changes in the advertising sphere.
Dasha Tatarkova
Deputy Chief Editor
The case with Reebok is interesting to me first of all because of how people react to advertising - and who exactly reacts, from passing by on Facebook to the company itself, which first posted it on Instagram and then cowardly deleted it. It seems to me that hypocrisy shows hypocrisy in hypocrisy: women have been objectified in advertising for centuries, literally comparing them with goods, relegating to a sexual object and even “dividing”, but this is outraged by customers (read: men), but criticism of this approach. Unfortunately, marketers are still confident that “sex sells” and are ready to use this principle in all variants. So, probably, this time is not really annoying to many people (only a lazy person hasn’t addressed him in the history of advertising), but the fact that this sex, firstly, is not aimed at men (as in advertising, as I understand it, First of all, it is about women's pleasure), and secondly, it does not fit into the usual ideas about what this sex is. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the time for advertising goods that are not related to sex, with the help of references to it, is a thing of the past. Sexualization of all - men, women and not only - as a way of selling closes the doors to other, more thoughtful approaches to his client. This, however, does not justify slatamiga in any manifestation.
Most of all, the behavior of a company that is not ready to take responsibility for its actions is outraged: to remove the post, leaving its heroine to take the rap for everyone, irresponsible and unprofessional. Not so long ago, Reebok was at the center of another scandal, and his attempt to rehabilitate could be counted if he stood to the end and came out in a united front with the heroine of his advertising. He progressively explained what was meant and why it was done this way - and would continue in the same vein, and not try to please everyone (hello, Habib). In the meantime, we are seeing the disconnection of the audience and the promise: people familiar with Zalina’s style are less than the brand’s audience, the meaning of the joke is lost without context, and there is no one to explain it to most.
Unfortunately, brands often do not understand how to respectfully communicate with their audience, and Reebok is an example of this - you just have to look not at Zalina and her joke, but at the other slogan of the campaign: “Be a man”. In the original, it sounds like "BeMoreHuman" - roughly speaking, "find the best in yourself." However, we approved the translation of "be a man," and then stuck it, without thinking twice, to photographs of women. And now it angers me: what are you trying to say? What is a woman before putting on Reebok, not a man? Such an adaptation of the English-language slogan seems to me a real failure, although the original can be interpreted in two ways.
Margarita Virova
Beauty section editor
I will immediately mark my position on femvertizing: this advertising trend does not seem to me to be something cool. This is a natural product of the transition of feminism to the mainstream: women’s rights are spoken so much and so loudly that any sneeze on this topic will bring together hundreds of reposts and is guaranteed to raise a storm on the Internet, and will also affect an audience far from the target. Talking about feminist advertising as a general trend began three or four years ago, and now in 2019 we see how big brands are conquering the heights of the absurd. We did not have time to move away from the attempt of manufacturers of razors to integrate into the current agenda, as the banner was picked up by the Russian division of Reebok.
The global campaign #BeMoreHuman, by the way, is quite neat and toothless - their main competitors have already spoken about women's power, and over the past couple of years, this style of campaign targeting women has become commonplace. Reebok Russia decided to go in a non-standard way and attracted not only a couple of athletes to the campaign, but also a public feminist Zalina Marshenkulova, who provided slogans and jokes for framing strong female figures. It seems to me that the main outcome of this collaboration is a striking lack of expression in the context of the brand legend. It was you, Reebok Russia, who misunderstood the guides on the campaign glorifying diversity last year and attracted three girls of model appearance to the advertisement? This time, the managers, apparently, googled "Russian feminists", went to Zalina and decided that it was the author of the channel "Women's Power" that should be made a representative of the brand.
It seems to me that it worked badly in both directions. The fact is that advertising is in any case a naive genre, splint, and it’s simply impossible to shove a long history in it and the difficulties of women's struggle. Obviously, no one was going to humiliate the men - all this faceting grows out of irony over the fact that society considers radical all feminists without exception. But if on Twitter, where everything is yours, such bantering of labels may look subtle and appropriate, in the campaign of a pathetic brand, it becomes simply frightening and incomprehensible. And Zalina herself receives threats and is experiencing unpleasant discussions. By the way, this girl created the great Breaking Mad and manages the most punk media in Russia - but this is not important now, right?
It seems to me that the commercialization of the struggle cannot end in anything good. In the course of discussions, many will find out the relationship with friends and satisfy the need for sofa activism, but still, creative femming still doesn’t carry anything. Especially if the "inspirational" advertisements come up with people who are generally indifferent to women's wrestling.
By the way, last year I learned that the Sisters Center, an important Russian organization that helps women faced with violence, collects only 36,000 rubles in monthly donations. I propose to leave the discussion of cunnilingus for a while and make a regular donation on this page.
Dmitry Kurkin
Opinion Editor
You can not even say that there is more revealing. The way the Russian representative office of an international brand once again works with a damaged telephone without reading the original message of the head office (the NYX branch recently distinguished itself in a similar way). Or how his employees, acting and without five minutes being, rush about, look for the last person, give a hack as a concept and make up an excuse for one more ridiculous than another - instead of calling things by their proper names.
But a good example, let it be a lesson for the following marketers, who, having decided to ride on the subject of empowerment, slip into aggressive vulgarity. Apparently, you just need to step on some rakes so many times that they stop banging on the forehead. In the meantime, you should stock up on popcorn and enjoy the flow of great jokes and variations of the great verbal construction "change the needle of approval."
Photo: Reebok