commercials

Oh "light" beverages. When will you stop freaking out and shoving your unnecessarily constructed masculinity in our faces? The latest in this long line of I'm-so-manly-it's-sexist diet drinks (predecessors include Miller Lite, Pepsi Max, and Coke Zero) is none other than Dr. Pepper 10, with a new ad campaign that screams IT'S NOT FOR WOMEN.


What makes a calorie manly? A tiny patch of chest hair and a miniature disdain for womanly calories? Read on to find out!

This commercial campaign leaves me conFUZEd. Read on for discussion of genderless fruit, fat-shaming and the marketing of rebellion.

Klondike rolled out a new ad campaign last week called "5 Seconds to Glory." The premise: You must complete a five-second challenge in order to get your hands on a Klondike Bar (a square of chocolate-covered ice cream). Why you can't just bypass the challenge and go straight to the bar itself is beyond me, but the real kicker here is the misogynistic, homophobic challenges Klondike presents.

Let's talk about Bounce. Specifically, let's talk about the "Sheets or Bar" campaign, the only ad series I've seen lately that can compete with the obnoxiousness of Virgin Mobile's stalker humor.

It seems that irrelevant talking animals are not the height of commercial vogue, leaving extra room for the gems Virgin Mobile has been bombarding me with at every break. And by "gems," I mean they're abso-freaking-lutely awful in every way. Take a look:

Those of you who have cable may have seen a new product advertised recently: the Trojan Tri-Phoria. Now, TV ads for vibrators aren't exactly headline news (in fact, we ran a charticle on vibrator commercials in our Buzz issue last year), but this new sex toy ad is airing during cable primetime shows like The Daily Show, and some networks (VH1, Spike) are running it during the day as well. Sex toy ads! In the daytime! What do we make of this? Let's watch the ad and find out:

Dating can be confusing -- especially when one or more parties links emotional milestones to consumerist signifiers. And yet ... somehow, the solution is probably not to buy cheap accessories at Target.

Did anyone else notice the bizarre sexism during the commercial breaks on last night's episode of Mad Men? I can accept that a healthy dose of douchiness comes with the territory when I decide to watch currently airing episodes of a show instead of waiting for it to come out on DVD, but I honestly felt creeped out by how skewed all of last night's ads were toward a male (and sexist) audience. Could it be that, because the show itself portrays a stylized hypermasculinity, advertisers are missing the context and coming up with campaigns to try and match Mad Men's outdated sexism?

I saw ads for (and this is just what I can remember): Lipitor, Viagra, NFL Sunday Ticket, and more, all aimed at middle-aged men who I didn't think were following Peggy Olsen's rise to the top all that closely. Oh, and let us not forget this gem, from Clorox:



Because, you know, sometimes even MEN do the laundry! And Clorox apparently dragged that ad out of its archives (here is a Feministing post on it from two years ago) just for Mad Men. WTF?

So, rather than watch the Super Bowl, I ate food and slept. In spite of my attempts to avoid the whole damn mess, however, I still wound up being forced to deal with the requisite oohs and aaaahs over the commercials. I'm not a big fan of commercials period--but Super Bowl ads are often especially problematic to me because they are well aware that they are appealing to the most base instinct of the macho drunk male getting it on with his macho drunk male friends (I read somewhere that more partner abuse happens during Super Bowl than any other time of the year).