Males as sex objects

In a recent posting, my buddy jokingly writes about how appalled he is males are being portrayed as sex objects and gives a couple of examples. One of the examples I didn't look at because I'm just a little too busy at the moment, but the other (which I had seen some time ago, but that I was happy to be reminded of) was for Brawny paper towels, a microsite featuring VERY funny videos is one of the most memorable advertising microsites I've seen in a long time (even though the videos take forever to download).

One thing that quickly comes to mind when thinking about the Brawny site is how increasingly important the Internet is and will continue to be in keeping advertising and all content fresh and pushing the boundaries. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Brawny TV ads that accompanied that campaign, but they were so dull and stupid compared to the online videos (e.g. they had a hunky guy presenting a birthday cake with a cheesy voiceover with none of the cleverness and just a hint of the tongue-in-cheekness that the online work had so much of). Makes you wonder whether the TV came first and was enhanced/blown-out by the online or the online was first and it was watered-down for the TV executions.

But in any case, it's clear that the online gave the advertisers the ability to reach out and be more creative, explore the idea further and really give the idea more dimensions -- thereby giving the brand a fuller personality. I think that's why TV is going to dominated by online content in the near future. The ability to try more things, to be more edgy and experimental will quickly catapult the "wild west" of the Internet to the forefront of media that we know today.

Pretty soon, in my eyes, roles will be reversed and TV will be more of a promotional mechanism for the broader, edgier content online. Consumers (at least the more forward-thinking ones) will tire of the watered-down, corporate-filtered content on TV and will want to get fuller experiences, where they will not only be offered different, more experimental content, but also the ability to self-select that which interests them most.