The rise of ‘empowertising’: How to successfully use feminism as the starting point of a solid marketing strategy

I’m in a good mood today. Excellent in fact. I’ve reached my goal weight, I’ve discovered a fabulous new conditioning treatment, and I’ve mastered three new tricks to please my lover in bed. What more could a girl ask for? Oh wait. We’re asking for a hell of a lot more. And advertisers are finally clocking on.

For far too many years, women have been bombarded with far too many clichés by advertisers pushing their wares. Some more dangerous than others. But now there is the slightest whiff of change in the air. Advertisers are getting braver. They are starting to treat women as, well, people. Though it’s not as easy as it looks. Advertisers like Dove, Always and Verizon are being complimented and criticised in equal measure for throwing these tired clichés aside.

Critics find these brands guilty of ‘empowertising’. It’s a new term coined by Andi Zeisler, co-founder of Bitch Media, based on a much older concept – commodity activism. Defined by Henry Jenkins, author of Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, this is “a process by which social action is increasingly understood through the ways it is mapped onto merchandising practices, market incentives, and corporate profits.”

But today’s feminists are questioning the effects of commodity activism. They rightfully ask if this approach is actually empowering for today’s financially viable and highly desirable demographic of females. In other words, some feel that using messages of empowerment to sell beauty products is a sneaky state of affairs.

On the other hand, surely the fact that advertisers have finally recognised that feminism is not going anywhere, that women have different needs, viewpoints and priorities, is a very good thing indeed. And the industry seems to agree. From the same city that banned flats from its red carpet, Cannes has now produced the Glass Lion, created in partnership with LeanIn.Org, which recognises work that addresses issues of gender inequality or prejudice through the conscious representation of gender in advertising.

“I think that commodity activism can be an important form of social activism, if the goals of such activism are not primarily organised around the accumulation of profit or building a corporate brand,” writes Jenkins. “For example, activism about girls’ self-esteem is hot right now – a whole industry has been built around it. With the Dove ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, the company encouraged a sort of ‘co-production’ with consumers, and called attention to the exclusionary (and often racist and classist) norms of beauty culture.”

Sure, brands are trying to shift products. No shocker there. But that doesn’t stop me from embracing campaigns like Verizon’s ‘Inspire Her Mind’ which focuses on gender equality in STEM and Always’ #LikeAGirl campaign, which aims to take away the negative stigma of something that happens to every woman, every single month. They join the welcome ranks of Unilever’s Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, which, at the time, was a bright light in the world of over sexualised, brutally photo shopped supermodels.

And now, Unilever is at it again. And its reasons for doing so are as much ethical as they are economical.“Over 70 per cent of the people making the decision to buy our brands are women. Our future growth depends on meeting their needs and aspirations and on supporting an increase in their livelihoods by fully and formally participating in the economy,” state the powers-that-be at Unilever. “We consider the advancement of women’s rights and women’s economic inclusion as a priority.”

In 2014, Unilever stated its ambitions to empower five million women by 2020. On Do it Day, my team’s goal on its behalf was a little more regional. We wanted to work with Unilever to engage female millennials in Brazil, one of its biggest markets, in entrepreneurship via a social community which inspires, informs and connects budding entrepreneurs with potentially valuable connections and content. In a country were 95 per cent of women would change their bodies if they could, we are doing so with the message that the beauty of their brains is at least as important as the beauty of their bodies.

As for how Unilever deals with the potential contradictions of using empowering messages for women to sell beauty products, it says it is all about the confidence its messages and its products help to encourage: “We believe self-confidence is a powerful enabler for women to achieve their ambitions,” says Lucile Tardy of Unilever. “So if we can offer products that answer their needs while making them feel more confident and ready to go after their goals, it makes sense for our brands to communicate empowering messages.”

I’m admittedly treading cautiously on this issue, but I do think there are worse things to be deemed guilty of than using feminism as a starting point for a solid marketing strategy. That’s because my expertise lies in telling the right stories to the right audiences. And lately, it is starting to feel as if those stories can be told more honestly, and with better intentions. After all, successfully marketing products to women means truly understanding them, not painting them with the same sexist, condescending brush.

Call me an optimist, but in the not-too-distant future I’m hoping gender will play a far less significant role in marketing altogether, no matter how positively it’s spun. In the meantime, Laura Jordan Bambach, co-founder of SheSays, summed it best when she begged the question: “Are campaigns such as ‘#LikeAGirl’ good pieces of work? In my opinion, yes.  Am I cynical about where it comes from? You know, I just don’t give a shit. In a time when everything seems marketed at young men, telling them how they are going to be superstars, girls can at least have their own their own point of view.”

Originally published in The Drum, November 2015 issue. 

Forget the hype, transmedia is just good advertising

By Marcie MacLellan
 
I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t particularly moved when I first heard the term “transmedia”. I came across it while participating in a development programme for filmmakers as part of the Venice International Film Festival. It was dubbed the “next big thing” and was supposedly transforming the way films were produced and promoted. But I didn’t buy it. I was sure it was just cross-media repackaged and re-marketed to the people who invented it in the first place.

I’ve since discovered that there are many ways to describe this new buzzword which first took the world of film and television by storm. It’s since proved so successful; it is now making its way across virtually every industry that relies on advertising to turn a profit. But apparently there is one thing it is not – and that is cross-media.

Using the ever-reliable Wikipedia, cross-media is described as “a media property, service, story or experience distributed across media platforms using a variety of media forms.” Meanwhile, the inventor of the term itself, Henry Jenkins, defines transmedia in his book Convergence Culture as representing “the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms.”

Using these descriptions alone, it sounds a bit either/or to me. But it is when Jenkins takes his definition of transmedia one step further that the difference in approaches – versus technology – becomes clear. He writes: “transmedia immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.”

In layman’s terms, the resulting difference lies largely in the perspective a brand story takes, the detail it offers and the impression it creates. With cross-media you generally start with one concept and deliver it across all media available. With transmedia, each medium that your audience interacts with should serve a very specific purpose, while allowing your story to unfold like chapters in a book. And like a good book, more of the narrative of the story is shared over time, allowing for a deeper connection with its characters. And that’s where, as a producer of content, transmedia can be far more exciting than cross-media ever was.

It is important to remember that “this practice isn’t device-driven, but is platform driven as it is the platform that subtly dictates and influences audience reactions, social and behavioural trends and user experiences,” writes Allison Norrinton in her article, Transmedia Storytelling – What’s it all about?.
“The bottom line is that with a solid transmedia strategy in place everything remains connected by the same central narrative and theme, but each channel excels at what it does best, rather than bending to fit a central idea that’s being repurposed for multi platforms.”

Film franchises and global brands are embracing transmedia, from The Blair Witch Project to The Matrix, from Coca Cola to Intel and Toshiba. When Jonathan Mildenhall, vice president of global advertising strategy at Coca Cola, spoke to Forbes last year he described the complexity that transmedia has demanded of their campaigns, particularly in relation to their commercial “Happiness Factory”.

‘It was an ad, and only as good as the media dollars that we put behind it,’ he told Forbes. ‘But transmedia helped us understand how the story arc and the narrative of the Happiness Factory could evolve over time and how it could be used through different channels.’

He went on to explain that this narrative involved detailed descriptions of everything that made up the fictional world depicted in the ‘Happiness Inside’ commercial, ranging from character names to make-believe locations, and continued this story across videogames and social networking campaigns, as well as traditional media outlets.

It isn’t just global brands with million-dollar budgets that are getting on board. Our local clients are also starting to embrace transmedia, with London School of Marketing (LSM) among them. Targeting an audience of local and international students who want to pursue a wide range of designations to further their career, the team behind LSM believes that education is a life-long process. That is why they want to do more than raise brand awareness – they want to connect with their prospects and customers over the long-term.

‘We are new to transmedia but are big believers in what it can do. We don’t just want to reach prospective students to tell them how much our programmes cost and what they include, we want to involve them in the full story about how the education we offer can make a long-term difference,’ said Anton Dominique, COO/CFO of London School of Marketing.

‘We have been communicating with email, blogs, white papers, ebooks, social media, webinars and more recently films – but we have been doing it from our perspective. What we want to do now is use our marketing efforts to better engage and represent the viewpoint of our different audiences, from international students to experienced professionals pursuing their MBAs.’

Like Dominique, marketing professionals know that as the world of the consumer changes, so too must their marketing approaches – hence the hype behind transmedia. I still think the term itself is a bit overhyped; after all, transmedia isn’t exactly ground breaking. But when the fit is right, I do have to agree that it can be game-changing.

Customers are the ones deciding what advertising they will respond to and how. To reach them, it is obvious that we need to tell brand stories that target audiences want to hear again and again. In that way, a transmedia approach is simply good marketing, managed strategically, with more innovative and personalised tools in place to deliver it. And that’s not so hard to buy into.

Originally published in TalkBusiness

By Will Fielding

Greengrocers are famed for their flippant use of apostrophes. But in light of the current fashion for major companies to do away with the possessive apostrophe in their brand names, perhaps Greengrocers will cease to be seen as linguistic oafs and instead be known as marketing trendsetters.

In the world of branding, seemingly anything goes when it comes to using possessive apostrophes in company names. There are two main camps in terms of usage. Those who do – such as McDonald’s, Levi’s and Sainsbury’s. Those who don’t – such as Barclays, Ladbrokes and Harrods. And then the odd company, such as Waterstone’s, who have decided to straddle the fence, using apostrophes in their text but leaving them out of their brand.

As the term ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’ suggests, people have a long history of battling with this awkward piece of punctuation. When Barclays was asked about the lack of one in their brand, they said “Barclays is no longer associated with the family name,” and that the apostrophe had “just disappeared over the years.” This seems to suggest that they consider the sound of their brand to have more value than the layout.

Contemporary language is forever being shortened and simplified. Emails, texts and social media have been lobbying for people to dissect their language into ever more manageable chunks since they began. Also, now that so many companies see their futures being reliant on online business, if they wish their brand name to resemble their URL, they must first remove all punctuation.

There is no single reason why many companies have decided to ignore the strict rules of the possessive apostrophe. I suspect that it usually comes down to a combination of things, from brand independence and contemporary usage to the stylistic bias of designers and the pressures they face when tasked with bringing freshness to tired old brands. Personally though, we tend to recommend keeping them in to help communicate a brand’s personality. But then, being writers, we would say that, wouldn’t we?

Putting Diversity on the Agenda

By Marcie MacLellan

When it comes to tackling diversity in film, it’s proven to be a challenging issue. Generally speaking, the majority of people I’ve talked to or worked with agree that the industry is long overdue a shake up and that the benefits to be had will be many. But, exactly how we are going to better represent the world we live in – both in front of the camera and behind it – is a much more difficult topic to agree on.

The BFI is taking a stand on this issue. And what’s more, it is putting its money where its mouth is. For any new film seeking BFI backed funding, it must firstpass its new three-tick system that guarantees the film is meeting at least the minimum in its diversity requirements. This means reflecting diversity in gender, social mobility, race and disability.

This is something I will be taking to heart, given that I am currently a part of Creative England’s leading film development programme, iFeatures3, supported by the BBC, Creative Skillset and the BFI. With gender diversity among its requirements, it is also particularly relevant to me as I’m among a very small percentage of female producers in this industry. But gender, rightly so, is just the beginning.

To make such a significant challenge feel manageable, the BFI has published a thorough set of guidelines. The goal is to get at least one tick from each of their three categories.

1. Onscreen diversity: This bit is fairly straight forward. The BFI are looking for films where”the narrative reflects diversity through the story and its characters,and explicitly and predominantly explores issues of identity relating to ethnicity or national origins, women, people with disabilities, sexual identity, age and people from a socially disadvantaged background.” They also place value on films that “attach value to aspects in relation to religion or beliefs.”

2. Offscreen diversity: This gets slightly more complicated – not in its concept but in its execution. It starts off easily enough saying that the Director, Scriptwriter, Composer or Cinematographer must be from a diverse background. It then goes into very specific breakdowns of percentages required across heads of departments, crew and production company staff.

3. Creating opportunities: This all comes down to the production company itself. In a nutshell, it essentially asks that production companies offer paid internship, employment or trainee placements to people from diverse backgrounds.

Fortunately, in the case of our feature, Apostasy, we’re well on the way to earning our three ticks. In fact, the key elements of our story were a perfect match from the start. Our lead characters are female, our story is set amongst the Asian population of Oldham, a key supporting character is disabled and our film centres around the subject of religion. When it comes to diversity behind the camera, our scriptwriter and myself are female as is our preferred DoP. That said, we’ve still got more work to do to get a perfect score.

As for why the BFI is implementing these new guidelines, their recent press release summed it up best. It is looking “for a fair reflection of people from different backgrounds in every aspect of our work – for the sake of greater creativity and authenticity, to widen the talent pool, to offer fair access to the industry and to introduce new voices and untold stories from across the UK. Diversity is not only good for creativity, it’s also good for jobs. It supports economic growth, it taps into what audiences want to see and it makes good business sense.”

This blog is part of our series with Birds Eye View, an organisation that showcases and explores the outstanding contribution of women in film.