Girl power pro women adverts are all the rage these days, but when a French TV station tried to borrow some of that goodwill, they just ended up with rage.
Honestly, someone should have known.
The ad begins easily enough. A few scenes of slightly askew domestic tranquility. A messy kid’s room, dishes in the sink, an iron left on, that sort of thing. Then the commercials ask where have all the women gone? To our TV station, France 3, ha ha … ha?
Nope. Not so much. The commercial went viral, and so did the rage. Apparently, supporting feminism by lampooning traditionally female household chores is a bad idea. Like I said, someone should have known. Soon, even France’s Minister for Women’s Rights (yes they have one) Pascale Boistard, got in on the action. Boistard tweeted, in a considerable understatement, that the commercial “did not seem like the best way to promote equal rights.”
Boistard is right, of course, but now some are saying the person whose job it is to promote equal rights among the sexes should have issued a stronger statement condemning the commercial. Maybe Boistard figured the station was getting a pretty fair whipping and chose not to pile on. Either way, the minister seems like a soft target in this scenario.
How could a room full of people in the news business produce and air a commercial so blatantly … stupid? Yes, people – even people in the PR business – make mistakes. But this one is so obvious. Then again, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it was so obvious, the producers were going for satire. If so, they missed the mark … and missed badly.
In the end, France 3 may employ the most women on their newscast, but before they air another commercial, they may want to ask one or two of these celebrated women to give it a look.
David Milberg is a credit analyst from NY.
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