New Ads Prove Tampons Can Be Cool

[matcom]

<snip>

The Spot: We see a tennis player crushing her ground-strokes and serves; a gymnast throwing herself around on the uneven bars; a female swimmer, soccer player, and snowboarder each doing her thing. Meanwhile, animated graphics tout a new "no-slip grip" and "360-degree protection." Says the announcer: "Get high performance when you need it most. … Game time, anytime. New Playtex Sport. May the best protection win."

I am not in the target market for this product. (Rarely am I less in the target market for a product.) But I was intrigued by this ad because it feels like a wholly new approach to selling tampons.

I called up Julie Elkinton, vice president of marketing for feminine care at Playtex, to ask her about the thinking behind this spot. "In the past," she said, "we and competitors have played on the embarrassment factor. The hesitation to engage in activities because of a fear of leakage." This brings to mind the classic tampon sales pitch, which typically includes some or all of the following elements: 1) a high school hallway or classroom; 2) the cutest boy in school; and 3) the ultimate tampon portent—a snow white pair of trousers. (Alternate scenario: group trip to the beach in white bikinis, with cutest boy in school making a cameo appearance.)

There are some shades of old-school fear-mongering still embedded in this Playtex Sport ad. The scenes of female athletes in action include several crotch-centric shots, including a gymnast with legs splayed wildly and a snowboarder in a strained, midair squat. But the point is only partly that these tampons will endure extreme physical contortion.

"You don't have to be doing sports to appreciate the product," Elkinton says. This is "sport-level protection" (in the hyperbolic phrasing of the ad), so certainly you can trust it when you're walking with Travis to geometry class. But the subtler message here is that these tampons are for girls with a certain type of personality—active, bold, confident. The ladies in the ad are kicking ass. The soundtrack is aggressive and beat-heavy (lyrics: "Step up, let the games begin, don't back down, may the best girl win"). And there are no boys to be seen.

http://www.slate.com/id/2157494/?nav=tap3

[ChoralScholar]

1. Hmm...

>Get high performance when you need it most. … Game time, anytime.

Sounds like a deodorant. Which, in a roundabout way, I guess it is.

[Phillycat]

4. Huh?

How is it a deodorant? I'm confused...

[ChoralScholar]

5. I suppose if you had pants covered in blood it

would start to smell bad, would it not?

[Phillycat]

8. Ew.

Well, I mean, I GUESS. Menstrual blood doesn't really have a smell. Not if you're hygenic.

[ChoralScholar]

10. Understood.

I was grasping for straws. Coffee stirrers really. They weren't even big enough to be straws.

[Phillycat]

12. Heh.

I'm guessing you have the other sort of equipment. :hi:

[ChoralScholar]

14. yea verily. EOM

[noonwitch]

2. Satan's dirty fingers!

Good christian girls don't use tampons. Somewhere, at Landover Baptist, there is a very funny article about this.

[bicentennial_baby]

3. We joke about Sport Tampons here all the time...

You should hear Sniffa's very own commercial for Extreme Tampons! :rofl:

[billyskank]

6. They've been advertising such products that way in Britain for years

Any tampon or panty liner ad worth its salt must include a woman rollerblading, or playing tennis, windsurfing, you get the idea.

[Hugin]

7. If I buy a box will I be able to do those things too?

I always wanted to be a gymnast!

:bounce:

[Phillycat]

9. Reminds me of that old joke...

Patient goes in for surgery. Says to doctor, "But doc, will I be able to play piano after the surgery?" Doc says, "Sure!" Patient says, "That's great, because I never could before!"

[jmowreader]

16. Reminds me of an even older joke

Buncha kids (all boys) sitting around on a hot summer day with nothing to do. One of 'em's mom gives them twenty dollars and tells them to go have fun.

One of the kids grabs the twenty and runs off yelling "I know exactly what to get! Wait here!"

He comes back with a huge box of tampons. The old kid yells at him, "what did you buy THIS for?"

The kid who bought the tampons points at the side of the box, "see? Says right here, 'you can go swimming, you can go horseback riding...'"

[LeftyMom]

11. On a related note, I happened to notice something about the pad and tampon machine in the ladies

room at school.

The illustration on the tampon side is a cylinder vaugely reminiscent of a tampon applicator but rather more like a stick of dynamite, with a female symbol on it. The "sanitary napkin" (we can't even say "pad" in the freakin' women's bathroom?) side has an illustration of...


a napkin.

Really. :rofl: I'm surprised it wasn't folded up like a swan or something.

We live in a society so uncomfortable with women's bodies can't actually show an oval shape that sorta looks like a pad on the pad dispenser in the women's bathroom.



To be fair, condom dispensers in the men's room should not say the word condom anywhere on them. Rather, their purpose should be implied by pictures of fireworks and the back seat of a car. :P

[Hugin]

15. What you describe is pretty much how it is with condoms...

There's usually a picture of multicolored flowers and a silhouette of a feminine figure...

From reading the front of the machine... You'd think it had 'sanitary napkins' in there.

;)

[LaraMN]

13. I want to see MacGyver selling tampons.

I would buy them.
Then I would rescue throngs of screaming children from a burning train about to derail into a lake teeming with rabid guppies.

[Deja Q]

17. If Apple sold them, would they be called "iTampons"?

:yoiks:

[bleedingheart]

18. actually they kind of look like iPods...

bwahahahah....thin with a white string...

hahahaaha ...I crack myself up...