Extrawurst: The Film

Well, there's a thing! Extrawurst goes Hollywood. Or Babelsberg.

Nothing to do with this rather ageing and dilapidated blog, of course. But I did have to go and see it.

Extrawurst, the film, is about what can happen when we shove people into "identity boxes". The scene is a tennis club AGM, and what starts as a well-meaning suggestion (maybe) soon gets out of hand. The tennis club members are literally at each other's throats.

The film is a non-stop volley of insults based on what "women", "old white men" or "Turks" are "meant" to think or do. Rather than relating as the club members with a shared interest in tennis -  Melanie, Heribert and Erol.

Extrawurst is pretty damned funny, and a good reminder to look for universal truths when developing advertising. Putting people in target audience boxes, from "LGBTQetc." to "GenZ" is lazy and superficial. 

And it's just not tennis.   

Mixed up, muddled up, shook up world

 

I had a lucky childhood.

I grew up believing I could do anything or be anything I wanted. If I set my mind to it hard enough.

At the age of 3 or so (above) I was convinced I was a dog.

I wasn’t at all concerned about whether I was a male dog or a female dog - it seemed irrelevant. I didn’t have any dolls - just a pack of furry toys. Many of them were dogs.

My hair was cut short and I tended to wear my brother’s hand-me-downs. It was a question of practicality. I did have a blue party dress with a sticking-out skirt, which I hated wearing. Not because it was a dress, but because it was itchy.

The boys’ clothes continued into my teens. I grew my hair a bit longer in the 70s, but so did my brother and most of the boys I knew. I do remember us getting muddled up by an elderly relative, who’d thought “the boy was the older one.” He was in purple cords, I was in a Ben Sherman shirt and jeans. We thought it was funny, a bit subversive. 

If you look at photos of groups of young people in the late 60s, 70s and 80s, the boys and girls look pretty similar. From Woodstock to the New Romantics. I dug out what I think must be a book to accompany an exhibition, entitled 14:24 British Youth Culture. It was published in 1986.

You can see the effect in these photos of punks and skinheads by Nick Knight.

But something started happening just after my son was born, in 2000. When he was small, our house was a sea of yellow, blue and red plastic. I bought his clothes from flea markets.

But I did start noticing that the brand new toddlers’ clothes in H&M were sectioned off  into “boys” and “girls”. For  “Mummy’s little man” and “Daddy’s princess."

And Lego had started producing rather “girly” toys.

And our neighbours/fellow primary school parents would have parties where men and women sat in different rooms. Or even “women/men only” parties. This latter phenomenon I initially (rather snobbishly) put down to class or maybe educational level. Or possibly even an age thing, although this seemed unlikely as it didn’t seem to reflect any kind of progress.

And that “Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars” book started a whole industry of pop-gender-psychology. Excerpts from 1950s publications coursed around the internet, demonstrating how dreadful life was for women in the 20th century. I found these somewhat suspect - my mum had two degrees and was better academically qualified than my dad.

Ten years ago, we had the whole full-blown pink glitter pony stuff spilling from the kindergarten into adult life.  

And then came the whole #MeToo thing, the victim/oppression/patriarchy stuff and the omnipresent adjective “toxic.” 

I wondered why on earth I’d want to join a “women only” group from my college, that I’d deliberately chosen because it was mixed. And whether segregation really is progress. 

This data, published recently in the Financial Times, didn’t really surprise me.

But some of the extreme reactions I saw on LinkedIn certainly did. A lot of screeching about how this is evidence that all young men are unredeemable sexist and racist bastards.

Still, I can look forward with optimism. I hear there’s a brilliant new invention called “gender-neutral clothing” for children.

Whatever will they think of next?

Find the gap?

 

A recent campaign from Nurofen has alerted me to a whole rich seam of Home-Grown Problem: Solution advertising that brands can dig into. An appropriate metaphor, as this is all about digging your own gap, and presenting your brand as the superhero that’s going to come along and right all wrongs and injustices.

It all started, probably, with Equal Pay Day and the Gender Pay Gap, which I remember working on with IKEA back in the 2000s. Nothing wrong whatsoever with bringing this inequality to public attention. Equal Pay Day itself was set as how far into the year women must work for nothing to be on the same standing as men. It’s cheering that the date has moved forwards from 26th March in 2010 to 7th March this year. Still work to be done, but good progress.

Now, back to Nurofen. This brand has discovered a “Gender Pain Gap” and created a campaign called “See My Pain” to help to close it. According to Campaign, “Fifty per cent of women feel ignored or dismissed by their GP when it comes to their pain compared to 36% of men.”

Aha! A villain of the piece - UK GPs. A quick search and I found that in the UK, 55% of GPs are female and 45% are male. Hmmm. If I was a  GP and had studied for years to get there, I don’t think I’d take kindly to brand and advertising people giving me a lecture about being sexist and ignoring women’s pain.

It doesn’t help that the creative execution is painful in the extreme. All the usual suspects are there in the film: plinky piano music, tearful testimonials, “victims” telling their authentic stories. And on the website, there’s a ghastly line that looks as if it has escaped from a potboiler paperback in the bargain bookshop’s sale: 5 Women. 5 Stories. 1 Painful Truth.

It’s the sort of thing that feels like a parody and makes me ashamed to be in advertising.

Unfortunately, Campaign is behind a very expensive paywall (a topic for another time) but reading the list of credits for the campaign, my jaw dropped. I won’t name the agency as you can look it up, but it’s one that has a main bit and a specialist health bit. Credits used to mention the main people who created and produced a film. But just looking at my line of work, the following were named from the main agency: Head of Planning, Planning Partner, Planning Director, Planner. Then from the health agency: Planning Director, Senior Strategist - Social Sciences, Senior Expert Strategist. 

7 Planners. 7 Excessive Salaries. 1 Crap Commercial?

Going back to those gaps. Yes, seek and ye shall find. Gaps, seams, unlevel playing fields. All humans are vulnerable to injustices of one sort or another. 

But that doesn’t make us all victims.  

RETROWURST: Children May 2003

 

Some of what I find while rummaging through my Retrowurst archive from the early 2000s could have been written yesterday. This month’s article, orginally written in May 2003, definitely couldn’t have been. They say that nothing throws the passage of time into sharper relief than having children and boy, that shows here. At the original time of writing, my son was 2, and not yet in Kindergarten. He’s now a chunky, beared six-foot-plus 20-year-old. There is precious little mention of technology here, and it’s worth bearing in mind that I had only purchased a mobile phone one year previously - a Nokia 6310. My son wouldn’t be getting his first for another 10 years.

Read on for a glimpse into a quaint, vanished world of childhood:

---------------------------------------------------------

I have just come back to Germany after a week in the UK and have been struck by the difference between the UK and Germany when it comes to Marketing to children, which is the theme of this month’s Extrawurst. 

 

Kindermarketing is a term that is almost unheard of here - in fact, when spoken, it is in very hushed terms and the American-English euphemism of ‘Marketing to Kids’ (normally seen in Comic Sans typeface, often with a ‘z’ replacing the ‘s’) is used. Of course, we do this in the UK too, and I’ve often wondered whether the usage of this term calms our conscience a little - ‘Kids’, especially with a ‘z’ conjures up cartoony figures with skateboards and baseball caps worn at odd angles who certainly seem streetwise enough to be marketed to, while ‘children’ evokes visions of Janet & John in Startrite shoes.

 

Whatever we choose to call it, markets and marketing with the under 12s in mind are simply less developed here in Germany. The most obvious manifestation is maybe clothes. In the UK, you can walk into Mothercare, Woolworths or M&S and it is impossible to find a pair of pyjamas or a T-Shirt without Bob the Builder or Barbie on it. ‘Traditional’ means Mickey Mouse. In Germany, it is the exception to find such things. Right up to the age of about 8, sweatshirts (if they have a design at all) may have a picture of a Teddy Bear (NOT the Disney Winnie the Pooh or even Paddington, but an unknown, unbranded Teddy) or a pony (no, not one of those pink, lilac and turquoise horrors, but a real, brown pony). In the supermarkets in the UK, the shelves are full of child-orientated products, be it breakfast cereals with marshmallows in, special small bananas branded Blue Parrot Café or similar by the retailer, bubble-baths in every imaginable fruit flavour or birthday cakes representing every TV character you’ve heard of. And this is on top of everything to be found in the traditional child categories such as sweets and toys. In Germany, these things barely exist. In a quick scout round the supermarket today, I found only a modest display of cereals (mostly Kellogg’s), certainly no fruit specially packed at all (let alone for children), one rather unimaginative children’s shower gel and only one cake (a deep frozen thing) that was child-orientated.

 

Children’s television does exist - indeed, there are whole channels devoted to it, but there are very few original German programmes. Most of it is imported from the US and UK, with such series as Sesame Street, Tweenies or Teletubbies dubbed into German (although with the latter, it’s questionable whether this is worth the production costs!) for the younger ones and then the usual cartoon offerings for school-age children. However, especially for pre-school children, there simply isn’t the structure and (dare I say it?) educational value that you get in the UK. The programmes are thrown together, with no link with a relatively educational programme for under-5’s followed by a loud action cartoon for over-7’s.

 

It does seem rather a shame that the country that produced such children’s classics as Struwelpeter and Grimm’s Fairy tales is now rather pedestrian in terms of children’s books. While books for pre-school children in the UK tend to be very colourful, imaginative and often funny, German books for this age-group tend to fall into two categories: the dreary realistic and politically correct (typical is a book I got out of the library recently for my son, who is nearly 3, on rubbish and recycling!) or nostalgic over-sentimental (woodland creatures and elves).

 

Now of course, there is a reason for all of this, which occurred to me when I was talking to a friend of mine, a Doctor with boys aged 3 and 4. She said that it is all to do with the German belief that childhood innocence is ‘sacred’ and there is a strong urge to preserve and protect this innocence for as long as possible. Once I thought about this, everything seemed to fall into place. This is the reason that miniature adult or teenage clothes, such as denim jackets, are not overly popular here for babies and toddlers, who are kept in woolly romper suits for as long as possible. This is the reason that, for a child’s birthday party, a mother will bake cakes herself (with maybe a few Smarties in the icing being the only concession to commercialism) rather than buying a ready-made Thomas or Barbie cake. This is also the reason behind the school system, where, although children go to Kindergarten from age 3 to 6, they do not begin to learn reading and writing (elements of the cruel adult world) until they go to school at the age of 6. Interestingly, most children are only at school until lunchtime right up to age 19. Someone (the mother) is expected to pick them up, give them a cooked lunch and help them with their homework. It also explains the strange (to me) phenomenon when I first came to Germany of interviewing ‘young students’ for trainee posts who were of an age where they’d be running a company in the UK!

 

The implication of all of this for brands and marketing is not that we should give up on marketing to children in Germany but rather that we should acknowledge the cultural differences that exist and be a little careful not simply to transfer concepts and ideas that work in the UK. Although the job is a little harder in Germany, it is interesting by virtue of the challenge that it presents. Rather than falling back on the idea of character merchandising, perhaps we need to develop real concepts and new ideas that appeal to children for their own sake, rather than just a quick ‘sell’ through associating with an existing character. Maybe the dearth of German children’s characters provides an opportunity for a brand to create something new. And overall, the key is that the ideas have to have integrity. For example, there is far less ‘fast food’ in Germany - while they may not be wearing scaled-down versions of adult clothes when they go out to a restaurant, the children’s menu in most restaurants offers scaled-down versions of real food (Wiener Schnitzel, Spaghetti Bolognese, grilled fish) rather than the ubiquitous Chicken Nuggets that one finds in the UK.

 

Another huge opportunity that I see is for someone to launch a range of children’s toiletries here with the pre-school 2-6 age- group in mind. As long as it’s made absolutely clear in which re-cycling bin to put the containers after use and what precisely will happen to them as they are re-processed, it will be a winner.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Thereafter followed a deluge of yukky gendered monstrosities in children’s books, clothes and toys - largely US and UK-driven. It never quite reached the sparkly, glittery, tweeness of those markets, although even IKEA and Aldi were at it. The pendulum is now swinging back, and I’m pleased to see that the German belief in sanctity of childhood stands pretty well firm.

Although one rather sad consequence is that those dreary realistic and politically correct children’s books now seem to dominate the UK market, too. 

Tiptoe through the tulips

I'm afraid that this post may have me sounding like a rabid Daily Fail reader, but sometimes I wonder what I'm still doing in this business.

I read that the ASA have banned the first two TV ads under the new rules put in place to "reduce gender stereotyping." Complaints had come in from the public to say that these ads "perpetuated harmful stereotypes." I took a look at the ads, expecting to see something outrageous. Offensive, even.

But I don't think I've seen anything so harmless in my life.

According to the BBC, three people (no, that's not a typo) complained that the VW ad showed women in a passive/stereotypical care-giving role. I'd assume those three people were taking the piss. But the ASA, in their infinite wisdom, have concluded that "this ad presented gender stereotypes in a way that was likely to cause harm."

Cause harm? To whom? In whose view? What possible harm could be caused by seeing a woman on a park bench by a pram for a couple of seconds in a TV commercial? What kind of a world is it where depicting someone as care-giving is "likely to cause harm"?

Maybe the woman in the ad finally had a longed-for baby after several miscarriages. Maybe she's a lesbian. Maybe she used to be a man. Maybe she used to be a wombat for all I know and care.

What on earth happened to imagination? I've posted before about the way everything seems to be taken so literally these days, with demands here, there and everywhere for people of all sorts to "see themselves reflected in advertising".

Please, please, please:

Bring back creative ideas.

Bring back universal human truths.

Bring back advertising as entertainment not a dull bloody reflection of real life.

All that will happen if this policing continues will be the emergence of new stereotypes which will quickly become as irrelevant and yawn-inducing as the old ones.

Who remembers the "new man" of the 1990s?

Macho Metamorphosis

"Grandpop" from "The Al-Eden Emergency"

I'm not going to wade in with my tuppence worth on the Gillette ad, suffice to say a couple of things. It's yet another prime example of this, employing the good old Procter & Gamble problem-solution formula, with a bit of band-wagon-jumping thrown in.

In addition, it's more ammunition for those who consider "Purpose" per se at best a fluffy marketing buzz word. But isn't it time to distinguish between "purpose-driven ad campaigns" (take a popular social issue and churn out a film that will polarise opinion/get lots of YouTube hits) and "purpose-driven brands" (everything the brand does is driven by its unique purpose, which is related to the product/service/experience the brand offers).

I wonder what Unilever make of their arch rival's attempt? I first blogged 3 years ago on the Lynx/Axe turnaround in the direction of Find Your Magic. Here's a Lynx film from a little while ago as part of the brand campaign:



I find the Lynx/Axe approach infinitely better than Gillette creatively,  but to me the strategy still feels awfully generic. It could have been hung on any number of brands targeting a broad audience of men. I fear that "male empowerment" will become as much of a cliche as "female empowerment" has become for brands over the last few years.

I do wonder whether the vogue for this men/women marketing en masse isn't just a little lazy.

Take this man:

He's famous for not holding back the tears.
He's done brilliant things.
He's even done heroic things.
But he's also been accused of sexual assault and racism.
He has (or has had) a number of mental illnesses.
But he has probably done unacceptable things just for the heck of it.

People are complex, and putting all men/women in the same box with a big "toxic" or "victim" label on it doesn't get us anywhere.

I'd like to see brands looking to their product, service, experience and values to find their unique purpose, and using that to drive all they do. And it doesn't have to be about the latest Twitterati issue.

If your brand does have a large proportion of men in its user base, how about looking at some masculine values that may be due for a revival (or maybe they never went away): courage, honour, strength, grit, decency, loyalty, respect.

Or are there no more (brand) heroes any more?

(Home-grown) Problem:Solution Advertising

Advertising in the past (especially from the likes of Procter & Gamble) frequently featured a format known as Problem - Solution. The Problem would be dramatised in a way first to get heads nodding - oh-yes-I-have-those-stubborn-stains-too-but-never-dared-mention-them. Then, in a starburst of glory, the Solution would enter the screen in a heroic pose, possibly accompanied by a man in a white coat or a super-scientific nifty demo.

Once super-hero Solution had done its job, the end benefit would be celebrated with cheesy smiles all around (particularly if the Problem was unsightly yellow stains on teeth, or similar.)

However, after a while, 'Problem Fatigue' began to set into that style of advertising. Most of the world's household stain problems, washday woes and less-than-perfect skin, hair and teeth gripes had been tackled, if not completely eradicated by the various solutions on offer. Companies started inventing problems to which they'd already made the solution. Or dilemmas which no normal person in their right mind would ever entertain. It all got a bit ludicrous.

But a few years ago, advertisers started to strike a rich seam. Problems - less physical, more attitudinal - that the advertising and marketing industry had themselves created.

Take the picture above. Back in the 80s, 90s and even early noughties, clothes and toys for young children were fairly gender-neutral. With a few notable exceptions. But for the last couple of decades, more and more sparkly pink and girl/boy-designated books, toys, birthday cards, wrapping paper  and even cakes and sweets have crept in. So, all of a sudden, there's an issue - gender stereotyping - that brands can bravely fight against. While keeping quiet about who created the problem in the first place.

Ditto Objectified Women in Advertising. There are more than a few plucky brands taking a stand against this issue. Accompanying their efforts is a narrative that suggests that back in the dark ages of the last century, almost all women in advertising looked something like this, unless they were cast into the role of mother/housewife:

And, worst of all, women at the time meekly accepted their lot of how they were portrayed. Really? Maybe most of us had more important things than advertising to worry our pretty little heads about at the time.

While we're on the subject of women, there are those now well-known enemies: flawless beauty:

And stick-thin models:

Again, these 'issues' - which were manufactured by the advertising industry itself - are being used as societal problems which the new, virtuous, purpose-led brands can rush in and solve in a blaze of awards, social experiments and tear-jerking commercials.

What takes real bravery, though, is to admit to having created (or exacerbated) a real problem, like plastic waste,  or  unnecessary additives in foods and make a commitment to do something about it:

Sometimes the world of advertising, with its issues, problems and solutions, feels rather like the world of reality TV, where the winners of one ghastly show are recycled as contestants for the next.

And no-one outside the echo chamber really cares.

Me Johnnie. You Jane.

I don't mind a bit of a brand drag party when it's done in the spirit of fun, even if there is a serious message underlying the carry-on. But with some gender-themed promotions I've seen, I do wonder  what the real motivations are. With International Women's Day coming up, my cynicism radar starts bleeping overtime.

Take the limited (to the U.S. market) 'Jane Walker' Black Label edition. This has been conceived to 'draw more women to the brand' and 'acknowledge a broader push towards gender equality.' OK, on the second part of that, there are donations to organisations supporting women's progress such as Monumental Women. (Whether building statues supports women's progress today is another matter.) But I question whether this is really going to attract women to the brand. Looking at Jane, with her cane and shiny boots, I think she's more likely to attract more men of a certain sort.

The VP of Johnnie Walker, Stephanie Jacoby, says that 'Scotch is seen as particularly intimidating to women'. Now, I don't ever recall having been seriously intimidated by a bottle of Scotch, but there you go. Ms Jacoby is allowed (maybe) to make sweeping generalisations about women because she is one. And she continues '... we like to think of our striding man and our striding woman as really walking together going forward.'

Going forward? Not after a few measures you don't. You go from side to side.

Well, I suppose if the hidden agenda was publicity, I've given them a little more.

I do wonder what awaits us next. Perhaps a gender fluid version, Jo Walker? And what about a few other famous brand icons attempting to attract more women? Can we have a Michelin Woman, maybe? Or a Mrs Peanut?

None of this is new, of course. A Pillsbury Doughgirl was around back in the wonderful gender-bendering 1970s.

Is segregation progress?

Back in the last century, the sexes were segregated - certainly when it came to books and learning. There were boys' schools and girls' schools, and at universities, women's colleges and men's colleges. I considered myself lucky to be growing up when all that was changing, and even made a little bit of history myself as one of the first women undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Over the last few years, there seem to be increasing calls for segregation - in car parks, in railway carriages, and more in more in the way some products are sold and marketed. Maybe International Women's Day has brought out the worst in them, but here are just a couple of examples from the (UK) publishing industry.

Penguin are going to pop-up in Shoreditch with their "Like a woman bookshop" from 5th - 9th March. This bookshop will stock only books written by women. A Penguin spokeswoman is quoted as seeing this as a push for "women's voices being heard and taken seriously ..."

Meanwhile, there's the publisher And Other Stories who will only be publishing works by women in 2018.

In my admittedly limited (to children's books) experience of the UK publishing industry, I've noted that it seems, if anything, to be more female-orientated than male. It is rare to find a literary agent for children's books that's male.

Are these activities creating a problem where there is none? Fiction-writing, with its calls for empathy and communication skills seems to be one area, to me, where women might just have the upper hand.

Where there is a problem is in countries whose regimes and cultures still suppress women. This will not be solved by a pop-up shop in Shoreditch. It will only be solved by publishers actively seeking out authors from these countries (and I don't mean comfortable middle-class third-generation UK-based women) and taking on the risks and dangers involved, if they believe that strongly in "making these voices heard/insert next cliche."

Incidentally, I've been invited to join something called Trinity Women's Network and attend several events that they host. Having gone to a mixed college, why on earth would I entertain the idea of segregation now?

Sugar, spice, slugs and snails

Seeing these German gender-specified crisps recently got me thinking about the whole area of gender marketing. I'm not talking about who you target your campaign at, but at product development itself. And I get the impression there's much more of it about these days.

Now, there are plenty of products and brands out there that target men or women specifically, with pretty good reason in the main. Toiletries and clothes, perfume and cosmetics are all areas where there are male products and female products (including the oddly named "boyfriend jeans" for which there seems to be no equivalent for men who might fancy the "just squeezed into my girlfriend's jeans" look once in a while.)

And there have always been attempts into cigarettes and beer specially for women. Do Kim ciggies still exist?

But the area where the gender-specific stuff seems to be have really taken off in the last few years is the area of children's products. I don't remember such a preponderance of pink and purple when I was little. Lego, for instance, has gone girly mad with its Friends series, leaving the boys (one presumes) to their Star Wars and Transformers. And in the books market, the Die Drei ??? (The Three Investigators) have been joined by Die Drei !!!

After 50 years of the boy detectives solving mysteries, I can only guess that the girls were called in to solve such tricky cases as Duel of the Top Models, Cheating in the Casting Show, Danger in the Fitness Club and The Mobile Phone Case.

Of course, when I was young, there were stories specified for boys or girls too, but the girls didn't have to to be styled up like Germany's Next Top Model to have adventures. And note that the title is not pink, it's blue:

Which brings me back to the crisps. OK, there were always certain brands of comestibles that positioned themselves for men, or women (Yorkie). But I always assumed that was ironic. 

The Chio Chips  above come in the variants Mädelsabend and Männerabend (Girls'/Boys' Night Out). The girl pack is purple and the flavour is Creamy Paprika, while the guys get a more butch Smoky Bacon colour with a Flamed BBQ flavour.

I really do hope it's all tongue-in-cheek.

I wonder if they breed if you mix them up?