Gillette came out with a new ad campaign for razors but centered around making a statement on "toxic masculinity" and the #MeToo movement. And apparently, its being with met with praise and backlash, depending on the perspective. I suppose it seems a bit patronizing and equally insulting of its main customer base. I wonder how their shareholders will feel if profits and PG stock starts dropping because of it, or if it happens at all. I've never used Gillette so personally I dont have a dog in the fight. But I'll never get the logic behind corporations making an overt political or social statement that is surely going to alienate a segment of the public (see also: Chik-Fil-A, Nike, etc.). Focus: Thoughts on the Ad Alt Focus: Should corporations be making statements like this in general? Also - any political shit-fighting results in a temporary ban. We have a thread for that.
Big fucking meh from me. Most of the companies that are shifting to this style of marketing already have ubiquitous products in the late stages of their product life cycle. The company has lost major ground to cheaper alternatives. They should be strategizing on how to be more competitive in the market over virtue signaling.
God bless things like Netflix, preventing me with having to deal with stupid commercials pretty much ever. I hope the ad fails for them, because “Toxic Masculinity” is a stupid ideology at best. You sell razors. Your slogan used to literally be “Gillette...The best a man can get”. Now, like the Ghostbusters remake, you’re insulting the loyal fan base for.... what? Companies can feel free to push any agenda they like to sell shit, the consumer consumes it and it’s on them. But in the era of social media you’re going to get it thrown back at you if you use an agenda to peddle your wares. Just sell your razors. “Hey folks, that Mach 5 thing we made twenty years ago still works well. Buy it!” Done.
Anyone who is a “loyal” Gillette fan and are offended your chosen razor is insulting you with this, you have no facial or ball hair to shave. I don’t particularly buy into the ideology they are selling but being offended at them outside of their ridiculous prices is silly.
Can I still shave my ballsack with their razors? I'm in grizzly mode right now, and not shaving my face.
Ehhh, I doubt the backlash on the BF5 issue had an impact on the sales directly. I think people just didnt feel like buying another WW2 shooter by DICE when theyve already made what, 3 of those? Thats a tough sell when the last one was a WWI game. I guess it didnt help when the response to the backlash was general arrogance by EA, but the game just didnt seem interesting to people.
What is the “deal”, it seems, with video game companies lately? It seems whenever I hear about them, another one (lately it was Blizzard) seems to be receiving backlash for some sort of dumb experimental endeavour or bullshit PR move. Has it always been this way?
More of a question for @Nettdata since he's directly lived in that world, but I would guess the SJW angle is to specifically generate controversy and therefore attention in a sea of games and gamers with dwindling attention spans, as someone else mentioned. As for the gimmicky bullshit, I have no idea. Probably them taking the quickest path toward profitability to appease shareholders. That doesnt leave a lot of room for experimental artistic endeavors I would imagine.
Meh. The people outraged by the current ad campaign are the same people who wanted to rename French fries to freedom fries back in 2003. A guy I worked with during that time tossed his Gillette in the trash because he was to stupid to comprehend a US company could have a French name.
FOCUS: This will become like any other weird / embarrassing ad campaign by a large company. Everyone will forget about this by next month. For the record, I've been using Gillette razors all of my adult life; they sent me a free Mach III when I turned 18, and it worked really well. Good marketing, that.
The monetization model is changing and that's creating backlash. Mobile games proved two things: There is a huge market of non-traditional gamers out there with money to spend. This new market is more heavily female than the old market. Evergreen titles with subscription models and micro-transactions make fucking bank. The mobile world has just leaned into these two facts wholesale, but the AAA studios are trying to take advantage of them without losing their original market. Their original market is pissed because they've spent thirty years paying for buy-once shooters with meaningful single player and now the market isn't delivering that to them anymore.
It is a decent product. That’s why I use it, the ad is stupid but it’s just the latest flash in the pan to cause an uproar. Advertising never swayed me much. I prefer word of mouth on something. If you produce something I like, I’ll usually use it regardless of who’s pulling the levers. That’s the only reason I can watch a Roman Polanski film. Great movies, but fuck that fucking guy for life.
I think it's a few things: Game companies are being run by MBA's that are all about maximizing cash out of customers, so they will constantly push and push and push the boundaries of what customers will tolerate or accept until they encounter resistance. I think some of the game offerings are so fucking ridiculous these days that the resistance is fast and fierce. In some cases they are trying to monetize a new vertical or market segment (mobile) with minimal cost to the studio, by skinning a generic, low-cost game engine with microtransactions built into it with their specific branding. That is bad enough. By then being so out of touch with their core demographic that they don't even realize what a bad idea that mobile effort is in the first place, that's just the icing on the cake, and elicits a huge outcry from anyone that is emotionally invested. Because have no doubt, a large number of gamers are HUGELY invested in the games they love... they are really passionate about them, and they take clueless decisions being made about that game personally. So couple the "are you fucking kidding me" with the economically driven cash grab, you get a huge reaction. Hence the "don't you all have phones" WTF moments. Gamers are a community, not a commodity, and you can only treat them as a commodity for so long before they push back. Game execs (at least the weak, bad ones) are afraid to make the news and get bad press. The fastest way to do this is to piss off someone who gets outraged at some "SJW" stance on social media. If you take a position against LGBTQRS or other social issues in your game, then they are quick to anger, become immediately outraged, and a social media firestorm erupts. Well, the vast majority of people don't do social media, in the sense that they don't treat it as a platform to showcase their views or agenda. This means that game studios then tailor their games to try and appease the vocal minority (as in the very, very few people that raise shit about it), to try and not elicit that response. Well, a number of game companies have now gone too far, to the point that it's pissed off enough "non social media" types that they are now taking to social media to push back against it. Now that they realize that the SJW demographic is hugely misrepresented in their paying customer base, they are realizing that just because they scream the loudest, and news companies pick things to be controversial and raise a stink, doesn't mean that they are the ones they should be making a game for. In the end, rather than bitch about it like those that are heavily invested in it (the passionate gamer or the SJW), people just don't buy it. So yeah, it's always been this way, but now I think we're starting to see a correction... one that results from going from an overly sensitive, reactionary side, to a "don't care won't say anything just won't come back again" side... only things have gotten so bad that the "keep quiet and never come back" side is actually pissed off enough that they're now telling them why they're not coming back.
Boy Im glad I got out of the gaming community years ago. Ive read the description of the GamerGate shit a few times and Im still confused as to what the fuck the problem was.
Me neither. Best I can tell, some gaming community went apeshit when it sounded like a developer was banging game critics for ratings. Then it turned out to not be true. But the momentum of the community was already going hard so they raged against the critics anyway for purportedly hating the community they represented, I guess. I still don’t get it or why anyone cared.
You got most of it right, except the part of it “not being true”. Quinn went as far as to put a gag order on her ex because she didn’t want word getting out that she was a whore. Since then she’s developed zero games, wrote an unsuccessful book about how awesome she is and made lots of money playing a professional victim like her partners Anita Sarkeesian and the beastly Briana Wu. The main source of the scorn originally was directed at Kotaku, who instantly developed a cringey social justice platform immedietly when this started. That is where your raging against the critics occurred— both in the fact they wouldn’t admit to the Quinn scandal, and they were trashing any game with scantily-clad women in it. They went as far as to go after the model who played “Quiet” in Metal Gear Solid. The fact that Kotaku partnered with Gawker and Salon certainly didn’t help. After that it was a non-stop, two year long pissing contest of insults. Some of it was pretty damn funny and entertaining.
If I was a competitor I would 100% jump on this. I would make the most ridiculous, campy, over the top masculine commercial for razors. It would put Old Spice commercials to shame. Snap up the market share with a sense of humour and all the people pissed at Gillette.
Old Spice with the commercials with warped sense of masculinity, owned by? P&G. I wonder what the outrage culture, the left in particular, really thinks about this new age of big business virtue signaling as a simple marketing strategy. P&G doesn't give a fuck about women or toxic masculinity. At. Fucking. All. A few years ago the big rage was to put green friendly language into companies' mission statements. Nothing beneficial came out of it to help the environment but sure was a great way to reinvigorate a stale brand. There is nothing of substance and it is purely a marketing ploy. Do the ends justify the means, just to have the conversation? Can a company be woke enough to overcome the same people cheering this who also detest big business?