Badger and Winters founder condemns sexist ads with #WomenNotObjects campaign

The ad from 2009, which featured a woman appearing to give oral sex to a burger, is among a number of campaigns that resulted from a Google search of the words “objectification of women” by American ad executive Madonna Badger in a campaign called #WomenNotObjects.

Some ads even cut women’s faces and just showed their bodies next to a perfume bottle, a handbag, or a t-shirt.

The video features well known ads portraying women as sexual objects with voiceovers that highlight the absurdity of each concepts. After losing her three daughters and parents in a house fire on Christmas Day in 2011, she temporarily stepped away from advertising. She created the Mark Wahlberg and Kate Moss Calvin Klein campaigns before founding her own agency in 1994. “I love my job but I don’t want to do it if it hurts anyone”.

The campaign encourage others to speak out by using their hashtag #WomenNotObjects. But a new video from ad agency Badger & Winters is asking if there isn’t a better way. The video closes with title cards saying, “I am your mother, daughter, sister, co-worker, manager, CEO”. “If I said I never did it, I would be a liar”, she admitted to the WSJ.

It ends with a black screen and white text: “Don’t talk to me that way”.

For reals, I love this video, and I hope that by putting this important topic in a humorous (rather than righteous) light, it will change some people’s minds about what they’d like to see more of in advertising.