-Fifty years ago ads for cigarettes were everywhere and endorsed by celebrities from sports to movies.

-Coca Cola, backed by the Soda Pop Board of America, once proclaim that our children’s brains needed sugary drinks in their formative years to develop properly and fit in with society properly.

–Airlines used to position their women employees as a wonderful way for men to replace their wives on their travels (or even find a wife for that matter).

Now, well past my formative years in the ad game, I am beside myself about the sexist advertising that still exists. I can’t say that I’m an innocent in the world of using the female form to sell product.

Check out these award-winning ice cream spots (yes, I am serious [!], I have shiny pieces of hardware touting my excellence in advertising for these gems…how misinformed was I?):

Creme d’Or Ice Cream

Looking back, I can’t say that I am proud, but I guess you can call me a reformed feminist because I don’t do commercials like that anymore.

Hard to find, but a fantastic gossip read.

The feminist led me to paid more attention to the famous Hollywood casting call. Marilyn Monroe made the casting call famous. Monroe had resolved to sleep with anyone who could help her attain fame and fortune in Hollywood. According to countless biographies, friends of the iconic actress routinely note that she had “sex with anybody she thought might be able to advance her career.”

Many others, male and female, have chosen to take this path, even today. However, women are still being subjected to the sexist rigors of the casting call and showrunners don’t even seem to feel the need to hide it.

There’s been some buzz about “Casting Call, The Project,” which features real women—18 in all—reading real casting notices. Their reactions range from as little as raised eyebrows to exasperated sighs and obscenities.

Three friends created the project—Julie Asriyan, Laura Bray and Jenna Ciralli—summarized their work:

“In our quest to find and create work, we became all too familiar with reading character breakdowns posted on casting call notices via the numerous casting websites (some legitimate and reputable, others, not so much). Throughout this journey, we would often share with each other particularly ridiculous, hysterical and appalling casting call notices.”

The project is working with over 300,000 Facebook views in its first 24 hours and it’s closing in on 100,000 views on youtube:

Each casting call notes the classic stereotypes about gender, age, body type, and race with many conveying the deepest cuts into institutional segregation of the sexes:

• “Loves being a woman, so she probably wears a push-up bra.”
• “Nerdy type of girl, nevertheless she has a boyfriend who loves her.” 
• “Her cleavage is her best feature.”
• “She’s actually pretty, even with no makeup.” 

My “favorites” are these lines:

• “Lead actress needed for film about feminism. She is moderately attractive.”
• “Prefer an actor who is not thin. This is a great role for a feminist.”

Seriously, who writes this stuff?!

Kudos to these real New York friends who creatively show that by taking ownership of the creative process, women can “bring about the roles we all want to see for female actors.”

In other news…

…London mayor bans sexist ads…

Women react to ‘body-shaming’ Protein World ads.

…Advertising Agency Returns Cannes Bronze Lion for Sexist Scam Ad for Bayer…

Violating privacy of women wins awards, but doesn’t pay well in public anymore.

and finally, A big brand promises less sexist advertising!

The post The Dreaded Casting Call appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

Tobacco has long been a fascination of mine. When I was growing up in the mid-70s, every magazine seemed to have a super cool cigarette ad with gorgeous, dynamic women and manly men. I learned that since the late 1700s, when the first tobacco advertisement appeared, tobacco manufacturers have been pioneers of advertising and marketing, revolutionizing the American way of doing business in the process.

It was hard to do any real research without the Internet and reference materials as a kid in the seventies, but I was obsessed to find out out the geniuses behind these campaigns. They were magic. Familiar. Aspiring. I mean, even Santa smoked for a while (and apparently they were easy on his throat). They gave me a taste of diversity and gender balance. They even introduced a certain sexiness usually reserved for the forbidden pages of Playboy.

I remember the buzz when President Nixon signed the measure banning cigarette advertising on radio and television around 1971 (yes, it was still buzzing a couple of years later, and yes, I am old…). My brothers in the broadcast industry lost $220 Million in ad revenue. The last commercial on US television was a Virginia Slims ad which aired January 1, 1971 at 11:59 PM on The Tonight Show. The ad featured model Veronica Hamel who was later seen on Hill St. Blues.

The Marlboro Man was in full glory by the middle of the decade and the magazine was the king of alcohol and tobacco ads. He was in every major magazine, in seemingly every Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, along with dozens of other magazines.

Originally he was the Marlboro Cowboy who was created for Philip Morris by Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett. At the time, Marlboro held one quarter of 1% of the American market. Today, they own over 35% of the same market. I want to be that guy who develops genius like this. I guess there is still time.

Those guys turned out to be Philip Morris brand manager John Landry, along with Leo Burnett Creative Director Hal Weinstein and ad exec Don Tennant. Landry saw the brilliance of the Burnett team and wound up dominating Tobacco Mountain for decades. A New York Times article on Virginia Slim titled “WHY THEY STRETCHED THE SLIMS” is an amazing look inside the world of cigarette advertising.

Yet, I digress…

As I alluded above, the biggest-selling cigarettes of all time, Marlboros, were once were a minor brand, marketed toward women. Marlboro’s motto actually was “Mild as May” and their filters were red, to not show lipstick stains. Camels were king. But changes were happening that would make America Marlboro Country.

In the early 1950s, when the first reports linking smoking to lung cancer came out, some smokers felt betrayed by the established brands. Unable to quit altogether, some retaliated by switching brands. The Philip Morris Co. saw an opportunity to improve Marlboro’s pathetic market share. It didn’t take Tennant long to figure out that Marlboro’s previous ad campaigns ignored at least half the potential market. And what would make this woman’s cigarette more manly? Well, in a word: men. And the rest is advertising history.

After the TV ban you would have thought that the smoking would have gone down. It was quite the opposite. Gideon Doron’s 1979 article, How Smoking Increased When TV Advertising of Cigarettes
Was Banned, took us behind the curtain and showed us how such a thing could happen. Quite intriguing.

Regardless of how much the world has tried to stop the tobacco industry, they continue to thrive. So, without further ado, here’s a #TBT with a gallery of ads from days past.

The post A Tobacco #TBT appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.