Nike Wants Equality For Female Athletes, Tell That to Marketers
Rather than launching a multi-million dollar campaign urging people to treat female athletes with respect and to judge them simply on their athletic abilities, Nike could have a spent a lot less money simply by targeting marketers, many of whom love to focus on female athletes' physical qualities more so than their athletic abilities. Or to all those celebrity handlers who love to get their girls in a Maxim or FHM spread.
Oh, and is it just us or is their something weird about this image of the Nike Women website and accompanying text which reads, "Are you looking at my titles?" Nike coyly playing into the very thing their trying to dissuade?
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Athletes should be ambitious people and in the words of Timothy Leary, “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”
Last I heard, David Beckham was hunky. Drop-dead gorgeous, with a hot wife. That's the wider, mass-consumption message that precedes him. And he's one of the biggest, most well-known athletes on the planet. So, I guess the one messge gets him noticed.
But the concurrent message is that he delivers on the field. And he does. He "bent" one into the goal just the other night.
The two messages apparently aren't incompatible.
So why should they be for female athletes?
Isn't the field/the pitch/the ice/the court one of the few places where the image, the near-naked pics in the lad mags and the drooling and the leering all fade away when the opening whistle blows? It all disappears when the athlete, be he/she hunky or sexy, delivers. Or doesn't.
That's sports.
All the other stuff is marketing.
As for the "Titles" copy, unless I'm reading it wrong, it seems to be yet another message that uses the tough-talking, attitudinal female athlete that's becoming a cliche. But it's better than that god-awful, "If you let me play" whimpoid message that was around a few years back!
Nike-- Not guilty!
Too bad for Adrants that their writer doesn't know how to spell "they're" correctly -- ouch!
Serena's judgment on this is questionable at best.