For those that haven't seen the ad it shows a woman strutting away from the viewer wearing nothing but white lace panties and high heeled shoes. She has a half-filled bottle of Bonaqua mineral water swinging nonchalantly in her hand.
To the left of the picture is a bin for Saint Mary's clothing donations where the woman's bra and dress can be seen sticking out from under the lid.
The copy reads as follows: "The more purity goes in, the more goodness comes out."
All very straightforward and the message is pretty obvious but what struck me about the ad was how it was viewed differently by the guys that I chatted to about it as opposed to the women.
The guys varied between those that saw the women being somehow demeaned and those that thought the ad was just quite good. Very few got the point that most of the women grasped instinctively.
Words like self-confident, attitude, arrogance came through from women who didn't see a half naked female being used to sell a product like a car or computer to the men's market.
They saw one of them. A girl strutting and confident about making decisions because she knows where she is at and where she is headed and of course she has a lifestyle to go with that attitude.
For the doubting reader who maintains that the women they know were threatened by that ad I would say that they are not Cosmo readers!
The target market grasped the message behind this piece of work and they are after all the only decent measurement of how good or bad an ad actually is.
Comments from readers that are not in the telescopic sights of the agency that created this ad may make derisory comments about women used as objects. However, the target market seemed to like the message that was delivered to them through their chosen medium.
A point that must be considered here is that woman are more brand conscious with mineral water than men. So a lifestyle ad aimed at women seems quite logical for this product.
This market research falls abysmally below any statistically valid results but the writer would be surprised if any official survey differed markedly from his unofficial research.
