The second instalment of Lindauer’s “national girls’ night out” took place on 15 November at various nightspots across the country. And to ensure that the blokes didn’t feel too abandoned on this night of feminine revelry, Lindauer and BBD arranged a few celebrity man-sitters to entertain the sullen couch dwellers at home.
Paul White regularly opines on ad campaigns as a judge for our Campaign Review section in NZ Marketing, just as he does on his students’ work in his role as course leader at AUT Adschool. Here he goes again.
Lindauer has been on a mission to empower the girls this year, and, in an extension of the Girs’ Night Out brand campaign, DDB played on the Sunday Star Times About Town section by creating an ad featuring forlorn, lonely male partners who were left at home to wallow in self-pity, iron, eat pizza, pat cats on stairs and watch TV with men friends as the girls got amongst it on Lindauer’s National Girls’ Night Out. And the esteemed judging panel of Matt Sellars from Saatchi & Saatchi, Crispin Schuberth from Barnes, Catmur & Friends, Paul White from AUT and Oriel Davis-Lyons from Special Group chose it as the best of the November bunch.
The various ‘Look At These People Having More Fun Than You at Fancy Events’ sections in the nation’s magazines and newspapers have a powerful pull on the often judgemental, fame seeking human animal. So, in a continuation of Lindauer’s ‘Don’t Worry Boys’—and in a continuation of its vow to never show the target market in the campaign—it hijacked The Sunday Star Times’ ‘About Town’ (or in this case ‘Around Town’) social pages to show real partners despondently left at home on National Girls’ Night out last week.
Lindauer and DDB’s recent tear jerker created a bit of a stir when it was released, with some seeing it as low hanging fruit and others (particularly the female target market) seeing the hyperbole as spot-on. But the piece de resistance of the over the top campaign was a champagne tower that was filled with salty male tears* during the 30 Days of Fashion and Beauty Style Weekend at the Cloud.
In the world of advertising, the portrayal of men often tends to be split into two major categories: the hyper-masculine, sex-fuelled, beer chugging, sport-loving creature or the hapless, helpless dunce incapable of doing even the simplest of tasks without the help of a female. Of course, there are many exceptions to that stereotypical rule, but both ends of this spectrum are often seen as being low hanging fruit. But, as part of Lindauer’s Girl’s Night Out campaign, Lion and DDB have picked that fruit, put it into a bottle and given it a good shake with a 90 second TVC by the Roadmap Institute called ‘Don’t Worry Boys’.