#WomenNotObjects Campaign Fights Sexism in Advertising
You may, or you may not have, noticed the amount of ads that hypersexualize and objectify women nowadays — it’s okay if you haven’t, because they’re so prevalent, coming from companies like DirectTV and Post-It, that we may have become numb to them. New York City-based ad executive Madonna Badger, along with her agency Badgers & Winters, have launched an international campaign called #WomenNotObjects, in hopes of stopping the objectification of women in advertising, once and for all. The campaign stemmed from a simple “objectification of women” Google search done by Badgers in November 2015. “[W]e are taking a stand today that we will never objectify a woman again in any of the advertising, content, posts — any form of communication that we do for any of our clients,” Badger told WWD. She noted that even though women make 75 percent of purchasing decisions, only 11 percent of advertising creatives are women.
On January 11, Badger and her team anonymously posted a YouTube video of women sarcastically confronting recent real advertisements for their sexist imagery, from Dodge Ram Truck using Sports Illustrated models for a recreation of Emanuel Leutze’s painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” to Carl’s Jr. using scantily clad beach volleyball players to sell burgers. A representative from Carl’s Jr.’s parent company, CKE, even blatantly told Adweek in October 2015 that it was “simply in keeping with the chain’s years-old marketing strategy of using nearly naked models and celebrities to sell sandwiches.” The copy at the end of the #WomenNotObjects video states, “I am your mother, daughter, sister, coworker, manager, CEO. Don’t talk to me that way.” If sex sells, we’re not buying it.
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