Gillette Faces Boycott, Backlash After Toxic Masculinity Ad
Gillette Faces Boycott, Backlash After Toxic Masculinity Ad. The commercial is slammed for stereotyping men and being condescending. Though the video only mentions Toxic Masculinity briefly it was a clear dog whistle to the far left, that and showing Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks is immediately viewed as a political act that targets only certain people.It is likely Gillette will face little to no real repercussions from the ad but suffice it to say this is a good example of political commercials done wrong. The company created an overtly political ad targeting men with feminist and social just rhetoric that they likely do not care about or will be angered by.
Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yesterday, Gillette launched a commercial asking, is this the best men can be?
Targeting toxic masculinity.
Naturally, this offended a lot of guys.
And I have to wonder, why is that a company that makes shaving products trying to preach about politics and the behavior of men?
This is just another commercial in a long line of commercials where companies have gotten political to try and capture the millennial market.
They firmly believe millennials want this preachy, progressive ad campaigns.
But ultimately, it doesn't work.
There have been some circumstances where it has, but for the most part, it tends to backlash.
So today, let's take a look at what Gillette did, why their commercial fails and is pissing people off, and what are the repercussions of producing a failed political commercial.
But before we get started, let me give a quick shout out to today's sponsor, VirtualShield.
VirtualShield is a virtual private network service.
They can help keep your data safe while you browse the web.
It's a simple layer of security.
Just go to hidewithtim.com and you can get 30% off.
30% off, that's just $3.49 per month, by clicking Get This Exclusive Deal.
And they'll get you started with a free 30-day trial.
So if you want to browse the web with a simple layer of security, just go to hidewithtim.com
and sign up today.
From the BBC, Gillette faces backlash and boycott over Me Too advert.
A Gillette advert which references bullying, the MeToo movement, and toxic masculinity has split opinion online.
The Razor Company's short film, called Believe, plays on their famous slogan, the best a man can get, replacing it with, the best men can be.
The company says it wants men to hold each other accountable.
Some have praised the message of the advert, which aims to update the company's 30-year-old tagline.
But others say Gillette is dead to them.
The ad has been watched more than 2 million times on YouTube in 48 hours.
Now, I want to point out, they say it's divided opinion online.
However, we can see 275,000 thumbs down and 47,000 thumbs up.
So yes, there is a divide, but it's overwhelmingly negative.
Relatively few people actually like this advertisement.
At the time the BBC wrote the article, it had 214,000 dislikes and 23,000 likes, meaning about 90% of people did not like the ad.
That's increasing all the time, they say.
Comments on the video are largely negative, with viewers saying they will never buy Gillette products again, or that the advert was feminist propaganda.
In less than two minutes, you managed to alienate your biggest sales group for your products.
Well done, wrote one angry viewer.
Twitter users are also sharing their disappointment with Gillette's new ad.
They must have known there would be backlash.
But while the response to the ad has been largely negative, as the saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Their next steps are very important, but it shouldn't necessarily be widespread panic yet.
Rob Saunders, an account manager at UK advertising company The Media Agency Group, tells Radio 1 Newsbeat.
Their ad is getting them good publicity, and good numbers, and causing a debate, which they must have known when they put out this ad.
Rob says Gillette will have anticipated a negative reaction to the advert from some people.
This ad would have been approved by many people high up at Gillette, he adds.
So they must have known there may have been some backlash.
Rob believes the strong reaction is because the ad is such a shift from how Gillette was previously promoted and that
has surprised people.
We knew that joining the dialogue on modern manhood would mean changing how we think about and portray men at every
turn, adds Gary Coombe.
Effective immediately, Gillette will review all public-facing content against a set of defined standards meant to ensure
we fully reflect the ideals of respect, accountability, and role modeling in the ads we run, the images we publish to
social media, the words we choose, and more.
For us, the decision to publicly assert our beliefs while celebrating men who are doing things right was an easy choice that makes a difference.
Celebrating men, they said.
And that's the problem.
They aren't celebrating men.
They made a male-critical advertisement.
People have talked about how Procter & Gamble, the parent company, has produced political ads before that have been successful.
But typically what they do in these other ads is promote an idea and say women can do more, you're great, do better.
It's not necessarily too different when they say men can do better, but this commercial highlights negativity among men.
It's not celebrating men doing the right thing.
It's not a commercial showing firefighters rushing into a burning building.
It's not showing Marines.
It's not showing heroes and saviors doing the right thing.
Instead of promoting the good things men do and celebrating that and encouraging that, they're highlighting negative things as if this is something all men agree with.
Now they don't say all men, but this is why people are likely angry.
Make a commercial where you talk about men doing great things and how you want to see them do more.
In a piece for Forbes written by Charles Taylor, why Gillette's new ad campaign is toxic.
He highlights first, while corporate social responsibility appeals can be effective, Corporations must be sensitive to the potential of consumers being skeptical of their motives, or not wanting to be told how to behave by a profit-motivated company.
Essentially, is anyone really gonna believe that Gillette wants men to do better, or does it come off like pandering and insulting to their actual core demographic?
Which is men who need to shave.
He mentions the creative in Best A Man Could Be could be more effective if delivered differently.
As is eloquently argued by fellow Forbes contributor Kim Elsasser, consumer behavior theory popularized by Robert Cialdini holds that people are motivated to fit in by gaining approval and avoiding disapproval.
Approval is often related to fitting in with social norms.
As El Cesar points out, that while the ad clearly disapproves of the bad behaviors it depicts, it simultaneously suggests that most men engage in these behaviors.
It follows that to fit in, or to be masculine, one would seek approval by engaging in those behaviors engaged in by a majority of the groups, not the some men, that is, not enough, in the opinion of Gillette.
Ultimately, this is a mixed message that Cialdini's theory would argue is confusing and makes it unclear to a young male what the message about being masculine and fitting in really is.
To put it simply, it's basically what I just said.
That when a young male watches this commercial, he's not seeing what to do.
There's only a couple instances in the commercial of what is doing right or doing good.
For the most part, the video is just criticizing certain behaviors.
So this isn't going to tell anybody how they should behave if they'd like to fit in.
In fact, it shows a bunch of guys doing bad things and other guys are in on it.
If anything, it's encouraging young men to engage in bad behavior because the commercial shows a bunch of men doing those things.
But another very important point is politically charged language should be avoided by advertisers.
The use of the term toxic masculinity in the ad was a flat-out mistake.
While only mentioned quickly and briefly, the use of this term which many men associate with a one-sided critique and stereotype of an entire gender.
Regardless of how much some, without marketing backgrounds, would like to believe that companies taking political stances on is okay, alienating a substantial portion of the target audience is never a good thing.
Michael Jordan's statement that he did not want to engage in political commentary because Republicans buy shoes, too, remains wise thinking.
Regardless of which political party or group may be alienated, it is simply bad marketing practice to offend significant numbers of your own consumers.
And this is something I brought up in a commentary video I made yesterday at my second channel.
You can check it out at youtube.com slash TimCastNews.
But what I pointed out is that your goal as a shaving company, as shaving materials, is to target men in general.
If half of men disagree with intersectional feminism, the only thing your advertisement can do is lose you customers.
If they made a commercial showing firefighters, like I mentioned, all the great things men do when they sacrifice, and they showed positive masculinity, then you'd get everybody.
You'd get people on the left and the right to say, that is how men should behave.
Instead, they made a stereotypical and critical advertisement targeting men, saying, you're doing wrong, do better.
And thus, you're going to have people who are upset because, for one, they said toxic masculinity, which is essentially a dog whistle to the far left, but also, they had Anna Kasparian in it.
Look, I don't care if you're a fan of Anna or not.
The point is, she is a polarizing partisan figure of the far left.
Naturally, you're going to have a lot of people who immediately see her and say, whoa, I want nothing to do with this.
It can only backfire.
What were they thinking?
If you want to make an advertisement that is political, even if you want to take a stance, don't show an extremely polarizing figure, which is going to turn off half of your audience, half of your customer base.
Another really important example of how this backfires when you pander is this story from last year.
Pepsi pulls ad accused of trivializing Black Lives Matter.
They had, I believe, Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, who it was, handing out Pepsis to cops during a massive protest, and this offended basically everybody.
As of April 4th, 2017, with nearly 13 million views, it has 164,000 thumbs down and 42,000 thumbs up.
People do not like this advertisement.
They do not like the pandering.
No one believed that Pepsi actually cared about Black Lives Matter.
It felt like pandering, and it trivialized the protest movement.
It was a bad move.
And once again, we see something similar.
But this time, the Gillette ad, in only about one day, has 275,000 thumbs down, almost twice what the Kendall Jenner ad has.
And once again, you're going to find people on the left who believe this is completely disingenuous, but mostly, mostly, you're going to find people who are either anti-identitarian or just offended that you're stereotyping men as somehow engaging in this behavior to try and fit in.
But let's talk about what's really important, the bottom line of Procter & Gamble.
And at this time, it doesn't seem like they're going to face any real repercussions.
In fact, as of this morning, their stock is actually up about 1.3%, so they're doing fairly well.
It did go down around the time of the ad coming out, but there's a huge spike here.
On Reddit, r slash stocks, they talk about a boycott on P&G, how it's getting started over Gillette's toxic masculinity ad campaign.
And there's a really good reason why they probably won't be phased by any boycott.
One user said, I have a rule that you've heard me say time and time again.
When a company decides to enter the culture war, I stop using their products.
I've cancelled Hulu.
I've cancelled some other services, and I won't use them.
Some people have said, but what about Twitter?
They're in the culture war.
Yeah, well, Twitter is the battleground for the culture war.
For the most part, I don't know why a shaving company is trying to lecture me about toxic masculinity, and I don't care to hear their opinion.
Gillette isn't an expert on any of these things.
They've hired a marketing company who has assured them millennials like this, and they're pandering, they're lying, they're just trying to sell a product, and they're doing it in a way that actually pisses me off.
I actually agree that there are problems with toxic masculinity.
But what I don't agree with is a company that could simply be explaining to me what their product does effectively, instead lecturing me about politics.
I don't care.
I don't want to hear your opinion.
So you know what?
I'm just gonna have nothing to do with you.
I'm going to back away and say, you know what?
I have no idea why you were engaging in this behavior.
I don't take issue with the political stances of many of these companies.
The issue is, I take issue with them trying to be political.
We need to separate politics from things as simple as shoes and shaving products.
I shouldn't have to worry about toxic masculinity when I need to remove hair from my face.
It makes literally no sense.
But the expansion of everything being political is causing problems across the board.
Now, there's no telling whether or not Gillette is going to lose or gain money.
Their stock is currently up.
Some people like to say, get woke, go broke, but that's not a law.
That's not necessarily true.
In some instances, you do get woke and go broke, like we saw with the Pepsi commercial.
They screwed up.
But there are other instances where producing a political commercial actually is a really good idea and works.
Shortly after the Pepsi fiasco, we saw this commercial from Heineken which hit the nail on the head and did everything right.
They showed people of varying ideologies or lived experiences, had them build a bar together, had them talk to each other, and then revealed they actually opposed each other for political or life reasons.
In the end, the people all chose to sit down over a beer.
This said something really great, in my opinion.
This commercial on YouTube has nearly 15 million views, 67,000 thumbs up, and only 4.4 thousand thumbs down.
Most people really did enjoy this commercial.
This.
is how you do politics right.
They didn't take a side.
They brought people together and said, why don't you talk about your differences over a beer?
They didn't say who was wrong or who was right.
They simply said, we recognize that different people have different views and different opinions.
How about we have you come together to realize we have more in common than we don't?
Have a beer!
And so, while it's not telling me much about their beer, what do you need to be told about beer that it tastes good?
If you like the beer, you'll drink it.
What they did effectively was promote their brand while showing something positive, showing people actually come together to discuss their differences.
And that is amazing, and I have tremendous respect for that.
And it does show the effectiveness of beer.
What does their product do effectively?
It allows people to sit down, have a real discussion, and talk about how they can make the world better together
and how we can unite.
That is politics done right.
Gillette, you screwed up, you played the game wrong, and they're going to learn exactly how not to do politics.
Ultimately, I don't think it's gonna matter.
They say there's no such thing as bad publicity.
That's not necessarily true.
If you lose customers and lose money, then publicity was bad.
But in the end, I think this is a short blip that most people will probably forget about.
Maybe it will get cited again in a year when another silly or stupid commercial comes out.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast.
Stay tuned.
New videos every day at 4 p.m.
on this channel, and I'll have more videos on my second channel, youtube.com slash TimCastNews, starting at 6 p.m.
