BrandsAmongMany

Well first of all, obviously here at *AmongMany we do care, a little. I was asked to look into this Motrin Mom’s debacle after seeing the ad on youTube. I read the comments, I watched the responses, I look at the twitter backlash, the websites devoted to writing about and/or slandering Motrin, and the Motrin Response Apology:

And what’s my take on this all? Am I personally offended? No. Do I think Motrin deserves to be boycotted for making this ad? No. Do I find it distasteful? Eh, no. And that led me to think… who made this ad? How did it get greenlit. I know I have tried to do much more distasteful things and was met time and time again with –’ but we might offend old people,’ ‘what about all the people who are bowlegged,’ ‘but some people are afraid of pigeons.’

Anyway this train of thought led me to wonder, who made this ad?
Some would argue, there is no way this ad was made by a mother. Maybe the person was young, and thought they were being clever. Or maybe some man, who hated how his wife was always wearing the stupid sling and complaining about her back, sent his wife to go see a chiropracter, who she fell in love with and then subsequently left him, wrote the ad. Who knows. But more importantly:

Can you tell if an ad is made by a man or a woman?

Remember this pregnancy test ad?

I remember the first time I saw it I thought, there is NO WAY that ad was created by a woman. I could envision two dudes, sitting in their office being handed this pregnancy testing brief and freaking out. They would begin by exchanging stories about girls they were with, and then they’d focus back down on the brief. They’d read all these impressive stats on the accuracy of the test and then they’d learn you PEE on it. They’d chuckle and then BAM. Technology you pee on, an ad is born, with a man stamp of approval.

A few weeks ago I came across this site called GenderAnalyzer.

It claims to have the ability to analyze your website using the text-classifier uClassify that “has been trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women.”

When I had it scan my personal blog, it predicted I was a man. FAIL.

I had a friend in school who claimed he could always tell the gender. Sweet, sensitive, hand-written, borderline-kinda-maybe funny — it was by a girl. He was a jerk (chicks do love hand-written type).

So back to this Motrin ad. Who made it? Could a female be as insensitive as the blogs make them out to be? Wouldn’t she recognize with all her maternal instinct that holding a baby in a trendy sling was meant to increase the bond between mother & child and look trendy at the same time? I don’t know. When I watch the ad I don’t hear a woman the same way I do when I hear Kashi ads.

What do you think? Can you tell the gender of an ad?

Tags: ads, gender