Post by Ace on Jun 18, 2003 21:02:33 GMT -5
Digging around in the archives and presented for your amusement:
Ad Review
Brosnan works like a charm in latest Maidenform effort
(Rating: * * * ½)
Bob Garfield
It’s just another execution of Maidenform’s longstanding campaign, a lowly poolout— but what a cool and limpid poolout it is. Pierce Brosnan is one of those rare individuals who can be infuriatingly debonair while expounding on underwear.
Infuriatingly debonair, that is, to men.
Certain insecure persons of the trouser-wearing persuasion feel threatened by Brosnan types; by those silver tongued Eurohunks; by those tuxedo wearing, lady killing, Prince Ranier wanabees; by those suave. sophisticated. manicured, charming, licentious gigolos; by those smug, creepy, Riviera lizards who are probably anti-American and I’ll bet anti-God; by those...
Anyway, that’s the way some men react. It happens that a lot of women look at your Pierce Brosnans and your Omar Sharifs and your Michael Yorks— handsome men with a different manner altogether—and react in a different manner altogether.
They see Brosnan on the TV screen, and suddenly imagine themselves with Remington Steele, manners aside, lingerie permitting, in the altogether.
“It was our first time in Monte Carlo,” Brosnan says to open one of two new 30-second spots from Levine, Huntlcy, Schmidt & Beaver, New York. “We were headed out for the evening. She said, ‘I feel sure we’re going to win tonight. I’m wearing my lucky bra. So we headed downstairs and, sure enough, we lost our shirts.
“At least one of us was dressed for it.”
Her, I’ll wager. And I don’t suppose Pierce was too put out. And I suspect there are multiple millions of women who would have sold their mother’s kidney’s to be in her place—at least in their mind’s eye.
Some people think Maidenform discarded it’s fantasy campaign when it started filming celebrited men, but that’s hardly the case. Forget half naked lady physicians, lion tamers in their skivies and “I dreamt I was exposed to dangerous PCB’s in my Maidenform bra” or some such. This ceiebrity close-up stuff is the ultimate fantasy campaign.
You don’t need a lot of bare skin or panting or wiggling rear ends to achieve sex in advertising. In fact, you don’t even need sex, if you can trade on romance.
Brosnan relates his experience coolly with amused detachment. It's not overtly sexual (in the manner of randy, nigh-unto-pornographic beer and fragrance commercials); rather, his anecdote is fairly innocuous and his telling quite matter-of-fact. Yet it is a fertile medium for the romantic fantasy of your choice. Which, of course, is entirely the point.
When this campaign first broke in September 1987, some ill-advised ad pundit panned it. In this very space, the so-called critic ridiculed the celebrity approach on the ground that it lacked two necessary ingredients for selling bras to women—namely, women and bras.
What a moron.
Lingerie is not a stain spray or a radial tire. Its perceived virtue lies not so much in product features as in intangibles: style and self-esteem. These are not the provinces of a rational appeal. This is no place for copy points. Stand in any lingerie department for as long as you wish. You will never see a woman walk to the counter and declare, “Yes, I’m looking for something really rugged in a panty.”
The key issue—one which Maidenform has always known, but which it has repeatedly blundered trying to take advantage of—is how the wearer feels about herself in Maidenform undies. Depicting a successful physician diagnosing Huntington’s chorea in her underwear is excessively literal and profoundly dumb.
But triggering a romantic self-image by soliciting the Dream Man’s opinion— well, let’s put it this way: If Pierce Brosnan is satisfied with Maidenform, chances are many women will be, too.
Oh, there are those who see a man ruminating aloud about women and immediately scream, “Sexist.” They bandy the charge loosely, as if the fact of sexual attraction were in and of itself sinister, as if the notion of a woman pleasing herself by pleasing a man were, ipso facto, proof of sexual enslavement.
There is sexism in advertisng but this isn’t it. This is a case of rudimentary psychology, rooted not in male-dominated society but in women’s original equipment. Women just happen to like men, even creeps like Pierce Brosnan.
Links to larger print ads:
pbfiles.t35.com/gallery/maindeform-ad-1990b.jpg
pbfiles.t35.com/gallery/maindeform-ad-1990a.jpg
Ad Review
Brosnan works like a charm in latest Maidenform effort
(Rating: * * * ½)
Bob Garfield
It’s just another execution of Maidenform’s longstanding campaign, a lowly poolout— but what a cool and limpid poolout it is. Pierce Brosnan is one of those rare individuals who can be infuriatingly debonair while expounding on underwear.
Infuriatingly debonair, that is, to men.
Certain insecure persons of the trouser-wearing persuasion feel threatened by Brosnan types; by those silver tongued Eurohunks; by those tuxedo wearing, lady killing, Prince Ranier wanabees; by those suave. sophisticated. manicured, charming, licentious gigolos; by those smug, creepy, Riviera lizards who are probably anti-American and I’ll bet anti-God; by those...
Anyway, that’s the way some men react. It happens that a lot of women look at your Pierce Brosnans and your Omar Sharifs and your Michael Yorks— handsome men with a different manner altogether—and react in a different manner altogether.
They see Brosnan on the TV screen, and suddenly imagine themselves with Remington Steele, manners aside, lingerie permitting, in the altogether.
“It was our first time in Monte Carlo,” Brosnan says to open one of two new 30-second spots from Levine, Huntlcy, Schmidt & Beaver, New York. “We were headed out for the evening. She said, ‘I feel sure we’re going to win tonight. I’m wearing my lucky bra. So we headed downstairs and, sure enough, we lost our shirts.
“At least one of us was dressed for it.”
Her, I’ll wager. And I don’t suppose Pierce was too put out. And I suspect there are multiple millions of women who would have sold their mother’s kidney’s to be in her place—at least in their mind’s eye.
Some people think Maidenform discarded it’s fantasy campaign when it started filming celebrited men, but that’s hardly the case. Forget half naked lady physicians, lion tamers in their skivies and “I dreamt I was exposed to dangerous PCB’s in my Maidenform bra” or some such. This ceiebrity close-up stuff is the ultimate fantasy campaign.
You don’t need a lot of bare skin or panting or wiggling rear ends to achieve sex in advertising. In fact, you don’t even need sex, if you can trade on romance.
Brosnan relates his experience coolly with amused detachment. It's not overtly sexual (in the manner of randy, nigh-unto-pornographic beer and fragrance commercials); rather, his anecdote is fairly innocuous and his telling quite matter-of-fact. Yet it is a fertile medium for the romantic fantasy of your choice. Which, of course, is entirely the point.
When this campaign first broke in September 1987, some ill-advised ad pundit panned it. In this very space, the so-called critic ridiculed the celebrity approach on the ground that it lacked two necessary ingredients for selling bras to women—namely, women and bras.
What a moron.
Lingerie is not a stain spray or a radial tire. Its perceived virtue lies not so much in product features as in intangibles: style and self-esteem. These are not the provinces of a rational appeal. This is no place for copy points. Stand in any lingerie department for as long as you wish. You will never see a woman walk to the counter and declare, “Yes, I’m looking for something really rugged in a panty.”
The key issue—one which Maidenform has always known, but which it has repeatedly blundered trying to take advantage of—is how the wearer feels about herself in Maidenform undies. Depicting a successful physician diagnosing Huntington’s chorea in her underwear is excessively literal and profoundly dumb.
But triggering a romantic self-image by soliciting the Dream Man’s opinion— well, let’s put it this way: If Pierce Brosnan is satisfied with Maidenform, chances are many women will be, too.
Oh, there are those who see a man ruminating aloud about women and immediately scream, “Sexist.” They bandy the charge loosely, as if the fact of sexual attraction were in and of itself sinister, as if the notion of a woman pleasing herself by pleasing a man were, ipso facto, proof of sexual enslavement.
There is sexism in advertisng but this isn’t it. This is a case of rudimentary psychology, rooted not in male-dominated society but in women’s original equipment. Women just happen to like men, even creeps like Pierce Brosnan.
Links to larger print ads:
pbfiles.t35.com/gallery/maindeform-ad-1990b.jpg
pbfiles.t35.com/gallery/maindeform-ad-1990a.jpg
;D
I'm innocent. And you should be. 
