Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25
“Gun Control Means Using Both Hands.” “I’m So Gay I Can’t Even Drive Straight.” These are the kinds of things bumper stickers say, often reducing big ideas into silly, simplified nuggets. But Elle UK is hoping its user-generated feminist vending machine will make a more serious message stick.
Elle UK has created a special campaign for its November issue which focuses on rebranding feminism. With the help of agency Wieden + Kennedy London, Elle has created what it’s calling the first “feminist vending machine,” which prints out user-generated pro-women slogans for free.
Elle, along with feminist blog Vagenda, has been encouraging readers to complete the statement “I am a woman and…” with stereotype-defying tweets along with the hashtag #iamawomanand. Ladies have been answering the question with both serious and fun responses. For example, @CharlotteNBS tweeted: “#iamawomanand I don’t need your permission,” and @SarahBosner tweeted: “I’m a woman and I like my scotch straight up.”
“It’s been 50 years since Betty Friedan’s seminal work ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ and in that book Friedan asks, so starkly, ‘is this all’?” said Beth Bentley, director of digital strategy and innovation at W+K London. “Back then this was such a striking thought, a call to arms to every woman to really think about her life, her opportunities and her aspirations. This project sought to tap into that spirit for women of the digital age, by asking them to finish an arrestingly simple sentence.”
To get their feminist tweets printed on stickers by the feminist vending machine it helps to be near W+K’s London office on Hanbury Street. Find the green window painted with a big red apple. Next the the apple are the instructions to complete the “I am a woman and…” statement in a tweet, using the hasthags #iamawomanand and #print. The sticker of your tweet will immediately print and come out of a slot next the the window.
As the instructions say, you can “stick it to the window, take it home, use it to change the world — it’s up to you.”
“We see this more as a re-imagining than a re-branding” feminism, said Bentley. “We could have chosen to make an ad encouraging women to think differently about feminism, but the idea of tying this issue up in a snappy ‘end-line’ struck us as reductive, and at odds with the underlying spirit of feminism. Our goal was to use creativity to make this issue bigger, not smaller.”
More in Marketing
In graphic detail: How Anthropic’s Pentagon refusal is paying off in downloads, brand trust and enterprise deals
OpenAI’s Pentagon deal seemed to spark uproar among its users, many of whom were against it. Anthropic’s refusal to agree to the terms was seen by users as the more trustworthy alternative.
How AI could disrupt retail media’s $38 billion search ad market
ChatGPT and other AI chatbots could divert shoppers from retailer sites, putting the $38B retail search market at risk.
‘Brand safety is moving from fear to curiosity’: Zefr’s Raddon on content-level accreditation – and what it exposes about the industry
The threat is no longer a discrete piece of bad content that a keyword list or a domain block can catch. Its volume.