I love Terry O’Reilly’s take on advertising and enjoy listening to his program The Age of Persusion on CBC radio whenever I get the opportunity, usually catching it by chance as I did this past Monday morning. This episode, Marketing the Unpleasant, tackles the subject of advertising feminine hygiene and other “delicate” products. 

Here’s how the episode is described on the show’s website:

They are the ads that make everyone squirm- consumers, media, and especially ad copywriters; ads for the funeral industry, laxatives, incontinence pads, and the queen mother of unpleasant ad briefs- feminine hygiene products. Terry O’Reilly kicks off the 4th season of The Age of Persuasion with an insider’s look at marketing the unpleasant, from the strange-but-true history of marketing menstruation products, to Wal-Mart’s recent decision to sell caskets and urns online.

Now I don’t appreciate the marketing the unpleasant description as regards advertising menstruation products, (he actually calls the assignment  “the Queen Mother of awkward (ad) briefs”) but the show provides some interesting insight into the history of menstrual product advertising.  I learned that it was ad legend Arthur Lasker who came up with the idea to bring menstruation education to high schools, which subsequently “led generations of young ladies” to his client’s product – Kotex.  Men setting the agenda for what young women learned and thought about menstruation? Just to sell a product?  Hey, it’s still happening today. Now we’ve got male doctors setting us up to buy cycle-stopping and other hormonal contraceptives for everything that ails us. If you listen to the show you’ll hear some clips from a 1950’s Disney produced film called Molly Grows Up. The film was written, directed, produced and consulted by men.  It will make you either laugh or gag.

I’m not sure how I feel about the coy approach O’Reilly takes to the subject of menstrual product advertising. It is annoying to hear perpetuated the same old themes of embarrassment and discomfort. He also suggests that women are more uncomfortable with these ads than men. If true, maybe it is because menstrual product ad campaigns never quite seem to hit the mark.  (Thanks to Society for Menstrual Cycle Research member and re: cycling guest poster David Linton, many of us have seen the broad range of feminine hygiene advertisements developed over the last 100 years.  There is much to critique.) One thing that surprised me is that O’Reilly ignored one of the more groundbreaking campaigns he has written about in the past – the Kotex ads with the red dot and the word “period”.

Marketing the Unpleasant is available as streaming audio.  My suggestion: listen to the intro, the next bit about an Israeli HIV awareness campaign, then skip forward to the 11:00 minute mark where the feminine hygiene section takes over.  See what you think of the piece.  Oddly, of the 13 comments posted about this program, only one – from a woman – references the actual show content. (To be truthful, the comments were mostly from people looking for the streaming audio because they missed the first episode.) I hope if you find the time to listen, you’ll add a comment of your own.

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