Gender pleasures

This is my favourite ad of the week. As well as being beautifully executed it also has a powerful category overturning creative idea at its heart. It deftly avoids prurience, novelty, or a big 'fooled you' moment. Instead a story of truth, self acceptance, authenticity, respect and ultimately self empowerment gently unfolds.

It's a brave idea for the agency to propose and even more so for the client to buy. Well done both whomever you are. However what I really love about this ad is the casual nod to women and not men at the end. It manages to perfectly create a bond of empathy with it's target audience whilst highlighting the product benefit. It also shows that rational and emotional can co-exist in the one execution.

I'm enjoying this joyful tongue in cheek banter between the sexes that I keep see popping up in various guises today in London. It's not done for provocations sake nor is it tainted with sexism or malice. Whether it's art or advertising it seems the pleasure and delight of sparring gender roles is in knowing that in today's world we each embrace their fluidity and recognise the importance of their equilibrium in whatever shape that may take.

On that note I went to see George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion last night at the Old Vic. I loved it. Consummate performances all round with plenty of jokes just for women, just for men and for men and women together to enjoy peppering the dialogue. The play's themes of class relations, unhealthy obsession, and antagonistic sexes seemed as fresh today as they must have done in the 1900s.

Of course Eliza's famous line "Not bloody likely" brought the house down.