Last month saw the end of a 16-day
United Nations campaign
to galvanize action to end violence against women and girls around the world. In
partnership, the United Colors of Benetton produced an ad campaign of its own, aimed
at millennials, to help transform violence into beauty.
The 76-second spot depicts a barren
desert in which a beautiful woman in orange sits ringed by a half dozen young
glowering male models of various ethnicities (including, oddly, a guy who looks
like he stepped off the set of the TV series Vikings). To the accompaniment of ominous, atmospheric music, the
camera finds a stone at one of the men’s feet, and so we anticipate a stoning,
one of the most barbaric punishments ever to spring out of the dark heart of
humankind.
Instead, the men begin angrily
hurling not stones but flowers at the woman until she is sitting on a carpet of
petals. She looks serenely at the camera and the ad proclaims: “End violence
against women now!”
The Benetton campaign also features
“Facing,” an art
project which seeks “to use acid to create, not destroy, beauty.” Every year
thousands of women are victimized by incomprehensibly sick acid attacks. The
short video shows that the corrosive power of acid can be used not to only
deface – literally – a woman, but to etch the image of a beautiful one into
metal.
“We have been too much used to
seeing violence,” says
the creative director behind the “flowers” spot, Eric Ravelo. “Our choice was
to show the problem through something that is more emotional, and more
beautiful. This is a celebration of the woman, and a stronger emotion than if
we showed her bloody, or with a black eye. We chose the flower, not the stone.”
Ravelo told Marketing
Daily that the ad is aimed at millennials partly to reinforce the
perception of the brand to young people (Benetton’s core customers are 25 years
and older), and partly “because this is exactly the kind of change that must
start from the young generation to the old generation.”
But Elizabeth Nolan Brown at
Reason.com found
the spot to be “marketing gone very, very wrong.” She felt that “filming a
whimsical, sexualized, dreamlike version of violence against women seems a lot
more like trivializing and capitalizing on their misery than making a statement
or a difference.”
I confess that my initial reaction
was somewhat the same as Brown’s. While raising awareness can’t be a bad thing,
it is always only the first step, and too often it’s the only step. I’m very
skeptical of solving serious problems through Twitter hashtags, slickly
produced commercials, and selfie
posturing. These may make people feel virtuous and pro-active, but do they have
any real world effect?
Look at the Nigerian girls
kidnapped by the insanely brutal Boko Haram. The widespread hashtag campaign
#BringBackOurGirls, shared millions of times on social media, flared brightly
for a short period, involving even the
First Lady herself. But in the end it accomplished little except to stroke
Boko Haram’s collective ego for bringing worldwide awareness to their mission
of eradicating western culture in Africa. “A viral hashtag,” as the New Yorker’s Naunihal Singh put
it, “is a fever that breaks quickly.”
My first thought was that the
Benetton campaign, while striking, would have the same imperceptible impact. But
upon reflection, I think the company may be onto something. “We tried a
different road,” Ravelo explains.
“We have been trying shocking—this time we are trying to reach people with
beauty and emotion. This is a new approach for Benetton communication. It is
still powerful. That is the way we want to represent women—as beautiful.”
There is limitless beauty in the
world, but increasingly today it seems that we have to wade through limitless
ugliness to find it. Scowling
while holding handwritten hashtag signs may trend for awhile on social
media, but what may really touch people in unexpected ways and bring a new
perspective to the issue of violence against women is turning the ugliness into
beauty.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 1/9/15)
