Ferial Haffajee : Design of the week
They were in need of a hard sell. Old favourites indeed, but a little frayed at the edges. So men needed rebranding, decided Marie Claire magazine recently.
The results of the advertisements for men’s competition appear in the magazine’s November edition. They are a welcome break from the “exceptionally soothing cream for upset skin”, “rehydrating” this and “rejuvenating” that advertising which pollute the pages of glossies.
Men, like floppy discs and vinyl records, are almost obsolete. What with their lower sperm counts, the recent Constitutional Court breakthroughs on artificial insemination and the glass ceiling shattering around women on the fast-track, men need all the communications help they can get.
Gitam International went phallic: they remind women that cacti are all pricks, that bananas go off and that vibrators run down.
Network’s offering is more cerebral: their ad features three half-titled books called Juliet, Cleopatra and Bonnie, the unstated pay-off line obviously being what would women be without Romeo, Antony and Clyde.
The office favourite is Herdbuoys’s “Save- the-Male” campaign which offers women a cut-out mask of Brad Pitt to use on your husband or partner when he may have “gone bald. His bag of bedroom tricks run empty. “