Freedom Furniture comes up with one for the little ladies
It’s a sad fact that not all brands really understand modern consumers, and that can sometimes show in plodding advertising messages.
Happily, Freedom Furniture is able to bring insights and cutting edge creativity to its female-focused communications that puts it a cut above everyone else.
If they were able to send this ad back to 1958.
Still, great that it ran the weekend before International Women’s Day, eh?
Wow, I wonder if some clever planner wrote a brief for this along the lines of: “She likes to be patronised, in between washing dishes and doing laundry”
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On the contrary Mumbrella – if the ad said ‘every mans dream – being paid to drink beer / sleep with women / laze around the house’ – would that be considered ‘outdated’, ‘patronising’ and ‘sexist’??
Probably not, because they only guys that would bitch about it probably breast-feed their kids.
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Mark that’s not exactly hypothetical – most advertising does portray men in a patronising, or at the very least one-dimensional, light. The problem to me is not that it’s offensive in any way, but that it’s lazy communication.
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Tony Abbott works for Freedom now?
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So I suppose now it is also every womans dream to be pigeonholed, stereotyped and reduced down to the lowest common denominator?
Oddly enough I have a lot more going on in my life than shopping, and though this may sound outrageous to these stuck in the 50’s ad execs, I DO NOT LIVE FOR SHOPPING.
Although I wonder how I would even be able to go shopping as Freedom Furniture most probably wants me chained to the kitchen sink….
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I hope I am not the only one disgusted by this ad. We as women have come a very long way in the last 50-60 years pulling ourselves out from under this kind of ridiculous male oppression and I for one do not feel like going back.
Rewarded? What with? A nice pat on the head and slap on the rump, then off to the kitchen to fix dinner?
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I agree. What happened to plain language?
We’d like to give you back 10% of everything you spend, so you can spend more in our store.
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Have we become so politically correct that no one is allowed to have a bit of fun…has anyone heard of humour, it’s a light hearted ad that is different to other retail ads.
People get your heads out of your proverbial and allow yourself to have a laugh. It would do you and the world you live in a bit if good.
And I don’t work for the creative agency
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I’m not that offended by the innate sexism (let’s face it, I really love shopping). I just think it’s a poor way of targeting customers – when I wander around Freedom, it seems heavily skewed to couples and families. At the very least, it’s not like they are just selling womenswear. So why just target women? Don’t men get to help choose the furniture?
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Paul – I’m all for politically incorrect humour. Don’t think that’s what they were going for here though.
Is this masterpiece M&C’s work?
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I love shopping; it’s my only hobby, apart from staring at men in wide-eyed, open-mouthed admiration.
Happy International Women’s Day, people.
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It’s a special day? Well, shouldn’t you be baking us a cake to celebrate, @Acatinatree? That’s a good girl…
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Just for the records, I included a hilarious HTML tag indicating that the above comment was clearly a joke and sarcasm, but the Mumbrella comment section ate it, thinking it was real HTML.
So, just to be clear, I don’t think women should bake me cake. They’re certainly allowed to, I like cake, but the onus for cake bakery should lie equally across the gender divide.
In this spirit, which guy wants to bake me a cake?
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I’ll bake you a cake @warlach, but don’t expect it to be edible – not only do I hate shopping, I can’t cook either! *shock* *horror*
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This is as bad as that ad which had the boyfriend putting on sanitary pads all over himself like they were Star Wars costume props.
Humour has it’s place but does it always have to be so obviously sexist.
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Channeling Mad Men a little too much?
“Excuse me, I’m off to have another scotch and think of another stereotype to degrade inadvertently…”
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@Warlach
I’ll bake you a cake, provided that cake = fairy bread.
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You’ll find women in every level of government and every level of the corporate heirarchy. You’ll find us running our own multinational companies, advising world powers and curing diseases.
But apparently all that comes second to our uncontrollable shopping lust. And non transferrable vouchers.
When did advertisers become so out of touch? Actually no, the soaring personal debt rates attest to the fact that more than a few ad agencies know their stuff.
Whoever did these Freedom ads though… bunch of out of touch dinosaurs.
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@tweebs do you mean the current Mastercard-derivative Tooheys ads? As a ‘bloke’ they open all my twisties
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“I guarantee you a man made that commercial.”
“Of course a man made it. It’s a commercial, not a delicious Thanksgiving dinner.”
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Yes it’s sexist, but it’s also a lame message: “be rewarded to shop at this store”. Oh wow! And you have to spend $1000…not a small investment to get a 10% ‘discount’.
Retail incentives in one form or another are everywhere. You’d want your agency to put up a better idea than this one. Now they have 2 reasons to fire the agency! #freedomfail
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Exactly Tim, its not even a discount, it is just a voucher which forces you to visit their store and spend at least that $100 there, which probably isn’t enough to cover anything so out comes the credit card again.
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I’m sick of this kind of advertising all over Australia, no wonder things are so backwards with the percentage of women in senior management declining.
San-pro advertising is a sick, sexist horror.
The prevalence of the two-blonde-children-married-mother-father advertising is just execrable.
Oh! but Australia is such a young!!! and *progressive* nation!
🙁
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Who has time to shop.
There are far to many dishes to wash and shirts to iron.
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Oops M&C.
Oops.
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What a pointless ad. I would never buy a big ticket item like furniture. My husband looks after those sorts of things.
;b
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