Bloomingdale's and the Date-Rape Ad

It is a rare thing that keeps advertisers and marketing representatives alike; awake, wandering the halls of their quaint, urban, apartments at night: the fear encased in the release of new print or digital advertisements and exactly how the public will perceive it. Even with as much as advertisers can see into the mind of consumers everywhere (thanks to systems like Nielsen and Simmons), there is still a chance that the consumer won't appreciate a message the way you meant it to be. 

On that same coin, I can't place blame on consumers for seeing this message the way they did, and quite frankly, as an advertising fanatic student, I can't see how it made it out of the creative department in the first place. The print copy states "Spike your best friend's eggnog, when they're not looking." Kind of harmless, right? NO. And, if the copy itself weren't bad enough, the image features a man looking staring at a smiling woman, who just happens to be looking away, laughing. Now with tensions in the female community directly related to date-rape and similar traumas, one would assume we shouldn't joke about those kinds of things, thus normalizing rape - as is fairly typical of today's society. It's not just an issue with the desensitization of rape in our society, it's with the ultimate objectification of women that occurs every. single. day. 

(You can read the Ad Week article that features Bloomingdale's apology as well as a link to the image, here.)

Society as a whole has an issue with women, and even as a Strategic Communication (Advertising and Public Relations) major, I see it all the time in advertisements: from this BMW ad, to this Tom Ford ad, there is no shortage of creepy advertisements out there that have everything to do with making objects out of people. This is causing a much larger problem in society, and arguably contributing to not only violence towards women, but violence as a whole towards everyone. While I know there are several campaigns out there that have overly-sexualized men as a response, it is far more common for women to be portrayed as an object and no more. So when do we say no more? 

Recently, CollegeHumor released a video about sexual assault and violence, (here; seriously watch it, it's amazing) and it's purpose was comparing sexual assault to a bear. Joining ranks with other videos such as Consent (but with tea), it is using a humorous platform to stand up and speak out against date-rape, but the underlying issue still stands. Our society thinks of women as objects, inherently. Who knows if it started with cave-men, or if it lingered hard during the picturesque 1950's, but one thing is for certain, something needs to change. I am not an object. Women are not objects. Men aren't objects. People aren't objects. Objects are objects, and enough is enough. While I can't afford to shop at Bloomingdale's anyway, it's a testament to humanity that this ad got approved in the first place. Jokes are funny, violence isn't. Stand up for what you believe in, and one day we will all matter.