OddThinking

I don’t believe that the effect is entirely unintentional. While the brand owner may have plausible deniability, advertising agencies are university-trained in such subtleties.

I did consider that, Alan, and you could be right.

I decided the resulting effect was unlikely to be one that the advertising agencies were looking for. I can imagine their target demographic wanting to look “white hot”, but wouldn’t want to be labelled other ways. So, I assumed Hanlon’s Razor applied.

Also, the ‘w’ is at least partly obscured. Which makes the message just baffling.

Without wanting to get too far into old-fart, kids-these-days these days territory, I have to disagree with you on how the target demographic sees itself.

The link below is to a newspaper article about a study that shows a good proportion of young women see themselves as a “sex objects” – that their value as human beings is strongly (perhaps only) related to their sexual availability. As a user of Sydney public transport, I can say that the conversations teenagers share with entire train carriages from time-to-time tend to confirm this. You might also consider the recent (thankfully passing) fad wher young women adorned themselves and their cars with the playboy bunny logo.

http://www.qctimes.com/articles/2006/08/07/news/local/doc44d6d8ed1c841878552051.txt

I don’t think advertisers are above exploiting this.

I assume that if the text was moved left, or scaled down so the ‘t’ was visible the dot on the ‘i’ would be unfortunately placed.

And what’s with the feral hair? The whole composition looks a bit like one of those mock-ups the ad agency does to pad out their good proposals. You know how it goes, the client takes a liking to a POS and insists on putting it into production in prototype form… just a theory.

Alan,

I didn’t find the study to be particularly compelling. Correlation does not imply causality, not to mention the unreliability of the collection of self-reported sexual history of teenagers via the telephone. However, I suspect this is mainly misreporting. I bet the original researchers didn’t jump as far in their conclusions as the 17-year-old that the reporter interviewed.

Nonetheless, I take your point. Until I can understand why young women might choose to wear “Playboy” or “Pornstar”-branded clothing, I am in no position to make claims about how they would react to such “subliminal” messages about their sexuality.

Chris,

And what’s with the feral hair?

I doctored out the brand name from the image. I may have unintentionally truncated the hair, leaving it looking feral rather than the windblown-look the photographer was aiming for.

Sorry.

I was going to comment on what I thought of the ad and the brand, since I am probably in the target demographic, as well as the study/newspaper article and kids-these-days and what not, but I realise that there are so many issues and I don’t have enough clarity of thought about them. I really have just never understood why people are unable to use their own brain when it comes to advertising, media hype, peer pressure, pack mentality and the like.

Now the more I think about it, the more the ad confuses me. I own underwear of that brand, but I didn’t buy it because it is “white hot” (or makes me think I am). I guess “cheap and functional” doesn’t have quite the same impact. I wouldn’t mind seeing that on a billboard though.

But back to the typeface issue you raised – I agree and disagree. If the ad made more sense to me, I would probably prefer the typeface to be more readable. But right now, I don’t care so much about it, because fixing that won’t improve the ad. It’s beyond repair.

Maybe I should create a “cheap and functional” mock-up and present it to the appropriate authorities, not forgetting to paint over the current poster at a local tram stop on the way.

I had an interesting conversation with a young woman last night. We were talking about t-shirts slogans in general, and she mentioned, unprompted, that she used to have a “Playboy 69” t-shirt and a “Pornstar In Training” t-shirt.

I asked, as delicately and non-judgementally as I could, about her motivation, and she gave a mixed range of reasons. They included: claiming back her sexuality, seeking attention, paradoxically reducing the number of unwelcome lewd comments she got about her body from men, while admittedly increasing the number of stares – which she found less offensive.

I explained about the “White Hot” sign, and she thought that “White Ho” would be going too far; she wouldn’t find that brand message appealing.

I asked three other women (my unreliable estimate is that they were all between 22 and 28 years old) who all denied that their would ever wear Playboy-branded clothing or similar.

Thinking about it now, I remember that I have purchased a shirt with the playboy bunny logo, and another shirt with “Australians do it better” written across the front. My motivations were different – they fit well and were in an op-shop (once again, cheap and functional). My plan was to wear them inside out, so that you couldn’t see the logos. I still wear the “Australians” one, but am still unable to wear the playboy one (I discovered, upon trying it on again at home, that you could still make out the logo when it was inside out).

So, sorry, still unable to provide enlightenment. But there’s something about being hard to reach with advertising that I really enjoy. It makes me wonder though, if a company was really interested in my business, would it work for them to advertise their competitors’ products and not their own?

If my astronomy comment wasn’t late enough, I know I’m really pushing it here (though this even has a pingback to the recent post, so I feel slightly less foolish).

First, I wanted to mention your Hanlon’s Razor link is… not exactly broken, but doesn’t take you to Hanlon’s Razor. Second, I wanted to mention that in advertising it is often desirable just to get people to notice. So the near-disappearance of the ‘t’ could easily have been deliberate; and if it was, it may not necessarily have been to appeal to “the new feminine sexuality” as it were, but perhaps just for a little bit of shock value. Maybe if you have to take a second look to make sure you saw what you think you saw, it counts as two “touches” in marketing terms (or at least more than the first glance alone).

Oh crap, my Hanlon’s Razor link broke in the same way yours did. Um, I guess the apostrophe needs escaping. The link is supposed to be “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon’s_razor”.

Also, it was peculiar that the preview didn’t seem to work on the previous comment. I wonder if those issues are related, or if it was just some transient failure. I had started to think perhaps you had closed comments on this thread since it’s so old, but obviously you haven’t. 😉 And the preview works fine now.