The overarching role of marketing is to create in the customer the imperative to take a desired action, hopefully while doing no evil.
Today, children, we will talk about really evil people.
In my hometown of Tel Aviv, Israel, there’s a restaurant called Agadir which prides itself on its excellent hamburgers. It also prides itself on the attractiveness of its female servers, so much so that for the Jewish new year they issued a calendar featuring wholesome photos of the girls in action.
Here are a few samples:
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The man behind the campaign is actually a woman, one Keren Arnaldes, creative director for the Mu-Ar ad agency. Here are excerpts from an interview with her published in The Marker Online magazine (translated by me from Hebrew):
“You can choose to see them as humiliated and abused, but nothing there was staged…”
“Q: Does this mean that the waitresses chose to be photographed on all fours?… A: Totally… it reflects the kind of reality these girls live in… [these girls] are women, not little girls.”
“There’s nothing grotesque or pornographic about it…”
“Not every girl shown on all fours is submissive. Could be that she just wants to [bend over] that way. It comes from a place of strength. You shouldn’t take it to a sexist place…”
“They all do it out of loyalty to Agadir” (duh…)
Listen. I know sex sells, and I’m no prude, and bla bla bla. I have no problem with erotica or pornography or whatever. But there’s a big difference – from Maxim to Hustler to any amateur porn site, the models and actors are self-aware adult entertainers. This is not the case. Encouraging the servers to pose in compromising positions (the photos will haunt these girls for years to come), and taking advantage of their loyalty to the workplace, crosses a big, fat line.
From the creative director to the restaurant’s owner, you are nothing but self-righteous smut peddlers. And that’s evil.
Similar strategy to that of Ryanair, American Apparel and probably countless other commercial outlets.
Abercrombie and Fitch just opened their human circus here in Copenhagen (pretty much right outside my office); the parade of male models outside the store feels just as vulgar to me. I guess men are not hamburgers either.
I guess we all want to be adored or admired – one way or other. If admiration cannot be accomplished, it seems infamy is an acceptable substitute. As appreciation for a skill in either art or craft require at least some effort on the behalf of the observer, and effort is on short supply these days. It seems as if ignorance is being passed of as something desirable. I suppose opulence and unbound consumption mixed with blissful stupidity sends a message, just as obesity did 200 years ago.
I don’t think those shots will haunt the girls in the pics; they are pretty harmless compared to the stuff we see elsewhere, and for some of these girls it’s probably a stepping stone for a modelling career.
Instead, these pictures will haunt every other girl; the ones with normal eating habits, normal height, normal weight, normal metabolism etc.
And that is the tragedy.