They’ll be sexually active earlier than you think

I like this campaign. It’s funny, and it plays with the emotions of parental protectiveness to get a very serious message across.

It’s a very different approach than the pathos of Sarah McLachlan’s famous SPCA PSA. (TM Advertising’s CCO, Bill Oakley, told AdFreak, “When I see those Sarah McLachlan commercials, I turn them off. I can’t even watch them.”) And personally, I agree. These are positive and memorable.

See a campaign infographic video after the break.

Comments

I like the idea, but are there male versions of these? As it is, the campaign kind of plays into the wider narrative that women and girls aren’t sexual actors and that it’s their responsibility (or that of their, er, “owners”) to make them sexually uninteresting or unavailable to an uncontrollable and faultless male sexual rapacity.

Which is kind of disturbing and unfortunate, since these are funny and cheerful.

I get what you’re saying, Andrew, but in the case of animals (as opposed to humans) it is usually just the families of the females who have to deal with the unplanned offspring. And male animals really are that aggressive.

Perhaps the concept of comparing that to daughters does accidentally raise the spectre of human inequality, but I don’t feel that it pis trying to normalize that at all. They’re just pushing the button that will be most effective.

Nonetheless, point taken.

Oh, yeah! I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they didn’t intend to make that point or anything, and I’ve been around dogs and cats forever so I got a chuckle out of the accuracy of the human actors’ portrayals, but… I dunno. Something about a fifteen year old boy lunging at a ten year old girl and the father laughing and saying, “Time to get you fixed!” is just super creepy to me. I keep thinking about female circumcision and breast-ironing and that is probably not the association you want as an advertiser!

It certainly is not. O_O