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Guest
·All at sea over Rover 75 ad
Irish Independent; Feb 7, 2002
BY SIOBHAN CRONIN
MG ROVER's new billboard campaign for the flagship Rover 75 executive saloon could ruffle a few feathers with feminists.
One of the ads shows a middle aged 'playboy' type businessman in a white suit on a yacht, flanked by young models playing beach ball (!) and wearing matching white bikinis.
The businessman is distracted from the business at hand, so to speak, by the Rover 75 parked on the quayside.
The punchline is 'Just one of life's little luxuries', and the campaign, the over-hyped blurb tells us, was "adapted for the Irish market by Bates Advertising".
One wonders what un-adapted delights female motorists in other countries have to endure. More like "one of life's little faux pas" for the creative team involved. A straw poll of the females in the Independent's offices proved our theory: they were uniformly, to a woman, appalled at the lack of taste and the offensive nature of the ads.
And do these ads mean the manufacturer has no interest in targeting female executives, and is, instead, satisfied with alienating them? The blurb says the Rover ads are "taking a fresh look back in global advertising initiative".
But maybe their 'fresh look' is simply borrowing from the age-old advertising reliable realising that there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Irish Independent; Feb 7, 2002
BY SIOBHAN CRONIN
MG ROVER's new billboard campaign for the flagship Rover 75 executive saloon could ruffle a few feathers with feminists.
One of the ads shows a middle aged 'playboy' type businessman in a white suit on a yacht, flanked by young models playing beach ball (!) and wearing matching white bikinis.
The businessman is distracted from the business at hand, so to speak, by the Rover 75 parked on the quayside.
The punchline is 'Just one of life's little luxuries', and the campaign, the over-hyped blurb tells us, was "adapted for the Irish market by Bates Advertising".
One wonders what un-adapted delights female motorists in other countries have to endure. More like "one of life's little faux pas" for the creative team involved. A straw poll of the females in the Independent's offices proved our theory: they were uniformly, to a woman, appalled at the lack of taste and the offensive nature of the ads.
And do these ads mean the manufacturer has no interest in targeting female executives, and is, instead, satisfied with alienating them? The blurb says the Rover ads are "taking a fresh look back in global advertising initiative".
But maybe their 'fresh look' is simply borrowing from the age-old advertising reliable realising that there's no such thing as bad publicity.
