My love affair with advertising just slammed to a stop with just one ad campaign. Grey Worldwide just launched a campaign for shoe brand, Deichmann Graceland. What do you think? Needless to say, I won’t be linking to either company because this has got to be the most insensitive, thoughtless, inflammatory, antiquated drivel I’ve seen in a while. And that’s saying a lot in today’s world of in your face advertising. Take the line, “Men over 180cm earn 10% more money”, which implies that a woman that tall will have equal windfalls. Last time I checked, a woman that tall is considered a freak of nature that threatens most people’s comfort zone. Trust me, when you’re taller than everyone around you, and get called nicknames like Godzilla, it doesn’t lead to admiration and compensation for the receiver.
Frankly, Grey Worldwide, I would like to see all of your male executives wear these heels for the same amount of time that you expect women to wear them. I don’t care how “sexy” they make a female look, because I think that they’re torture devices. If you want to see just how sexy the results are, then look at a female foot that’s been crammed into these “pedal corsets” for extended periods of time. All you’ll see are gnarled toes that belie the external beauty of those shoes (don’t even get me started about cost). If you really want to sell your brand, at least do it in the 21st century and stop selling myths. I’d like to think that more of us admire the inner person rather than the external shell, no matter how tall that shell is. You remember the saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, don’t you?
– Thanks DesignTaxi, for warning us that some people still have a long way to go towards modernity.
