The new soft sell: #femtervising
When Always launched its award-winning #LikeAGirl campaign during the 2015 Super Bowl, you would have been hard-pressed to know the company was trying to sell feminine products. The spot earned more than 85 million YouTube views from 150 countries and paved the way for brands to unleash a slew of campaigns aimed at empowering women with hashtags like #SeeWhatsPossible (Neutrogena), #WorthTheWrinkle (Clarins), #PowerofShe (Athleta), #NudeForAll (Naja), #StressTest (Secret), and most recently #MyBeautyMySay (Dove).
But beyond sending positive messages, they’re also part of a larger trend in advertising driven by the need for perceived authenticity and reaching Millennial consumers, who value experiences and sharing them with others.
For Naja’s Catalina Girald, who founded the lingerie brand in San Francisco with the intent of empowering women, it was about making a splash with its racially and ethnically inclusive new collection. The #NudeForAll campaign launched in New York City subway stations May 23 and encouraged bystanders to post selfies on Instagram in front of the shade closest to their own skin color. Ads featured women whom Girald felt were breaking the mold — including San Francisco Ballet soloist Sasha De Sola, Silicon Valley software engineer Kelly Gottlib, and Latina actress Gina Rodriguez.
Traditional lingerie models, Girald notes, “are these mythical creatures that we can only aspire to be, and that we’re never going to look like. We wanted to bring it back down to reality — these women can be an inspiration to other women, and you can look at them and see your color or body shape and realize that they look so beautiful, and that you are also beautiful.”
She found her agency partner in Madonna Badger of New York’s Badger & Winters, which had launched #WomenNotObjects in January to address the objectification of women in advertising. Badger says: “I think a lot of brands are jumping on the female empowerment bandwagon. While I’m not a fan of ‘pink-washing,’ if it’s true to the brand’s mission, I applaud it. And consumers know when your efforts are not authentic, and will call you out on it. With Naja, creating a campaign like #NudeForAll was an easy decision because supporting women has always been at the core of their company.”
Similarly, the Association of National Advertisers Alliance for Family Entertainment just launched the #SeeHer initiative to promote more accurate portrayals of women in media. And to track all of these empowerment campaigns, the #Femvertising awards were created last year to honor excellence in “pro-female” advertising.
For a small company like Naja, social shares play a huge role in charting where to take the brand next. “I think you can measure success on a lot of levels,” Girald says. “For me it was successful because it went viral in lots of different countries, and it says this isn’t the only country looking to be more diverse in fashion. It really shows what the Millennial consumer believes in — not just here, but everywhere.” #NudeFallAll garnered 800 million impressions, the company says.
When skin-care brand Clarins was launching its line of Multi-Active moisturizers for women in their late 20s to early 30s, low brand awareness was a sticking point. Vice President of Marketing Maria Bertorelli described the team’s reaction when their digital agency presented #WorthTheWrinkle: “At first we were all like, ‘do we really want to talk about wrinkles?’ ”
“But then after a day or two,
“It’s not about a brand selling a product anymore — it’s about engaging the consumer.” Maria Bertorelli, Clarins VP of marketing
we actually kind of liked that it’s empowering you to say, not only am I having a great experience, but it’s not about the wrinkle anymore,” she says. “Clarins is an authentic brand. We never tell you to use this cream and you’ll never get a wrinkle in your life. What we tell you is you have to live the proper lifestyle — don’t go in the sun, but take care of yourself and enjoy life.”
The campaign was primarily a digital and social media push with an in-store component at Sephora stores. Influencers including blogger Chriselle Lim, fitness buff Carlie Butler and actress-photographer Maya Washington shared their own “worth the wrinkle” moments. It was the first time Clarins partnered with influencers and, considering the bump they saw in sales and web traffic, it likely won’t be the last.
“I think it’s definitely a huge movement that’s happening, and it’s a positive movement,” Bertorelli says. “It’s not about a brand selling a product anymore — it’s about engaging the consumer. So you have to engage them in a way that’s going to resonate with them, and right now girls have the power to be anything that they want to be.”
Not all are convinced brands should be playing in this space. Bitch Media co-founder and creative/editorial director Andi Zeisler, author of the recent “We Were Feminists Once,” says, “The whole co-opting of empowerment language — the explicitness of it is definitely new and very timely, but the ideas, images and assumptions that have been nurtured historically only in feminist movements being sort of co-opted to sell things, that’s not necessarily
new.” Heightened competition in the media-saturated culture means that brands need to find ways to stand out and be authentic, she continues, and women are a large focus of this.
Take Secret deodorant’s current #StressTest campaign: “One of their commercials is about a young woman who’s trying to ask for a raise and she’s practicing in the mirror of the office bathroom,” Zeisler says. “The commercial goes on for a really long time, and she’s getting more awkward and stressed out, and at the end, the copy that’s on the screen says something about Secret deodorant addressing the wage gap.
“But the message is not, let’s address the wage gap. The message is: If you’re having a stressful time, buy our deodorant. So it’s kind of a weird place in which you could argue that well, maybe people don’t realize that women often are made to feel bad or insecure for asking for the same kind of raises that their male counterparts have no problem asking for. That’s not a bad thing. If enough people say this is an issue, we should talk about (it). But that’s not Secret’s mandate.”
Whether or not these hashtag campaigns are helping brands to sell more products, it’s undoubtedly placed more pressure on them to mean what they say. Girald reflects of Naja, “This campaign more than ever made me realize how important it is to attach a value to your brand, and it also showed me how much voice a brand can have among people willing to care and spread the message.”