The invisible blinders of advertising types

This Business Week article takes a look at VW and their new advertising campaign. It touches on a couple of points near and dear to my heart.

First there is this from their ad agency:

Says a habitually cool Bogusky, wearing a Kiss T-shirt and stabbing his fork in the air as he scarfed banana pancakes at Greenstreet's, a café near his Miami office: "I like that they are talking about the work. If they aren't talking, then your brand is dead."

He does not mean the cars when he says "the work". He means the commercials his agency creates for VW. Talk about that work is good for him and his agency. But buzz does not sell cars and that is the key thing to VW.

Then there is this:

In launching the GTI and reviving the Volkswagen brand in general, Crispin faced two challenges. First, since the debut of the New Beetle, the VW brand has become feminized, says Keller. Loyal young males who were hanging on to VW by a thread needed to be reassured. Too many men had come to view VW as a "chick's brand."

[Snip]

Can Crispin's edgy playfulness go over the line? With the suggestive content, charges of sexism have followed. TV ads for the Winter Olympics depicted young men so into their GTIs that one refused to roll up the window to shield his girlfriend's wind-blown hair and told her to stop "yackin"' so he could enjoy the engine's growl. Another refused to take his girlfriend on an errand in his GTI because her weight would slow him down. Ouch. Nissan's Wilhite says he's all for shaking up VW's message, "but I can't go along with ads that marginalize women like beer commercials often do." Suzanne Farley, a Boston education consultant and owner of a 1999 VW Passat, agrees, saying the ads "made me feel weird, like they were talking right past me."

Turn on network television any night and you will see commercials that depict men, especially married men and fathers, as clueless, stupid, helpless dorks. No one is worried that fathers and husbands are marginalized. When a company creates ads aimed at men, however, the PC scolds and women of the furrowed brow show up in five seconds flat.