Crowd to Summer’s Eve: Hands Off the V

As the quote from “When Harry Met Sally” has it, “Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor, but they couldn’t all possibly have it.”

Marketers love funny, especially naughty funny and especially today, when naughty funny can go viral over social networks. But the last few years have taught us that marketing via risqué or cutting-edge humor can backfire. It’s very easy to misjudge the audience, at which point that cutting edge could be applied to your neck, so to speak. Remember the 2008 Motrin Web and print ad that jokingly compared babies carried in slings to “fashion accessories”? No, you don’t – because the ad was pulled two days later in response to a hue and cry on Twitter from parents who didn’t find it funny.

But you probably do recall the Groupon Super Bowl TV spots that put an arch consumerist spin on topics such as deforestation and Tibetan independence. Those ads will live on beyond their single air date—like the Apple “1984” ad, but for less desirable reasons.

Whether or not you found these humorous—and personally, I thought they were both well-intended bits of social satire with some funny moments—there’s no denying that the audiences pushed back hard enough to get them removed. (In Groupon’s case, the ads might not have been meant to live beyond the big game—although LivingSocial’s commercials are going suspiciously unmatched on my TV.)

Anyway, the point is that it’s incredibly easy to be too hip for the room… when the “room” is as large as cyberspace. Getting laughs around the conference table doesn’t guarantee a campaign won’t face-plant out in the wild.

All this is build-up to the latest brand effort that try to walk that fine line between clever and stupid, which involve what I will refer to in clinical terminology as “lady stuff”.

I’m talking about the “Hail to the V” campaign from feminine hygiene products seller Summer’s Eve feminine hygiene products. A tough topic to make visual right from the start, and one usually left to oblique tactics: soft-focus shots of women gardening, swimming, and walking along beaches while sharing freshness tips.

So Summer’s Eve came out with a broadcast and online campaign that included multiple elements, but most notably a series of three video spots that used hand gestures to represent the girly parts in question as they spoke about some of the brand attributes of Summer’s Eve’s douche and cleansing products.

It seemed a reasonable (if risqué) way to make a tough subject come alive, without actually incurring an R rating. So far so good.

But not content with that degree of difficulty, Summer’s Eve or its agency also decided to throw ethnicity into the mix by tailoring the copy to racially distinct hands. A black woman’s hand skewed urban, while a Latina hand broke into a stream of rapid Spanish and advised the listener to “get rid of that tacky leopard thong”.

Racist? Reasonable minds can differ. What seems a stereotype to one can seem a recognition of some real-world behaviors to others, exaggerated for comic effect the way Madison Avenue always does. Personally, sitting here doubly walled off from the subject as a Caucasian male, I thought they were funny. I also was aware that the Summer’s Eve Web site of which these videos were a part is actually very full of interesting, interactive owner’s-manual information on vaginal health care, including outside articles and a user quiz.

I’d show the offending videos to let you make up your mind about their potential to offend either women or ethnicities—but I can’t. Last night they were pulled from YouTube, and from the Web site as well, presumably in response to the hue and cry from posters on blogs such as Gawker.

Other elements of the campaign remain, including a commercial, “Hail to the V”, that stresses female empowerment through history to cartoonish effect. Very funny without racial overtones I can detect. Maybe a bit toward the Axe end of the smirky scale. And reportedly this spot was shown before some theater showings of “Transformers 3”—giving rise to a large number of impromptu facts-of-life talks with puzzled six-year-olds, I’m sure.

The Web site also links to a campaign blog, “That’s Vaginal!”, which purportedly aims to take the taboo off the word “vagina”—and puts those liberating words into the mouth of a cat.

Again, no danger of racist elements. But perhaps less funny than just… well, weird. Why a feline? If the obvious pun is intended, isn’t that offensive– more so because it’s a very male cat? Or is it mainly the usual Internet formula that “cats = cute=cat people traffic”? However, it’s worked well enough to get 364,000 views on YouTube.

But that’s very little compared to what the “Talking V” videos could have racked up by now, thanks to that reliable variable, comedy Central. In this case, Stephen Colbert picked up on the hand-puppet videos a few nights ago on his “Colbert Report” show, showed a few seconds of the African-American version, and then went on to post a male response, also using finger puppets. I post it here in the confidence that this one won’t be taken down. Warning; This IS offensive. But it’s aimed at men, and we find this stuff hilarious.

That’s a lot of viral oomph behind a campaign. And yet the Summer’s Eve brand decided that upside potential—getting your campaign talked about for 10 minutes on Colbert—wasn’t worth the harm that came from the racism charges.

I don’t pretend to be an arbiter of either taste or political correctness. But I know what seems offensive to me—for instance, the Summer’s Eve print ad last year that playfully suggested that women douche before asking for rasies– and I do my best to avoid giving offense to others. Frankly, I don’t think the hand puppet videos qualified as offensive. They grounded the campaign in some kind of everyday reality, using speech patterns that can be heard on the street every day. They seemed an amusing and clever visual aid that could grab viewers’/ visitors’ attention and lead them to a Web site that would mix serious, useful health information with marketing and a light touch.

Frankly, I found them a lot less offensive than TV spots that use simulated woman-in-the-street interviews to “get real” about the effectiveness of toilet tissue. (Thanks, we know what it’s for. Please get this ad off my TV.)

Just from a campaign standpoint, without the hand videos, the “Hail to the V” campaign seems less impactful. The web site’s still educational, the “Hail’ commercial is still funny but revolves a lot around men, and the cat thing is… still weird. But the video campaign is missing that element of women speaking to women without men in the room. (I know, the campaign probably was planned by a largely male agency—perhaps the same tin-eared bunch who thought up that 2010 print ad. But the effect of the videos was to add some realistic female voices to the campaign.)

And then there’s that Colbert bump. Summer’s Eve may still get some benefit from that, since he mentions the product and shows the excerpt. But the traffic-driver effect won’t be the same without the hand videos on the Web site available to users who want to see for themselves.

What do you think? If you saw the videos before they went black, did you find them offensive? Was the brand right to pull back? Is this a case of marketers rightly taking account of the feelings of a portion of their audience, or marketers caving to one segment of their target demographic and playing it safe at the cost of creativity and the power to direct their own campaigns? I’d be very interested to hear your views.