To raise awareness of the dangers of leaving a dog locked up in a heated car, PETA, an animal welfare organization made a commercial which was heavily criticized to be sexualizing women.
For the entire duration of this commercial, no dog was to be seen. Instead a ‘sexy’ supermodel was used to depict the message they were trying to get across. In the commercial, she was unwillingly locked in a car which created an imagery of kidnap and rape, which trigged Corey Lee Wrenn, the author of the article“PETA Sexualizes women & Uses Rape culture Imagery to Raise Awareness For…What?” to write about unethical marketing methods.
People were upset when women was used as a comparison to dogs, they felt “the real point of this video is to exploit sexualized violence against women to bring attention to PETA”. Although PETA launched this commercial with good intentions, they went too far in the attempt to attract viewers. The main focus of the commercial was lost, which in turn resulted in criticisms.
Some of the responses to this video was:
Dog damn! I have never realized how sexy it was to let a dog closed in a car for a few minutes!!!
This video has backfired in 2 ways. 1, I now regard women as dogs, 2., now I have a heat exhaustion fetish
Although PETA wants to draw attention to spread their message, but did they go too far? What are the ethical boundaries for companies? Will they do anything in their power to gain attention? Of course you cannot be certain on how the public will react, but companies definitely need to be more aware of the aftereffects of this kind of marketing. Or things can go really bad, like this one.
Sources: http://feminspire.com/peta-sexualizes-women-uses-rape-culture-imagery-to-raise-awareness-for-what/
I thought this was a video to raise awareness for the kidnapping and sexual abuse of women. It took them about a minute into a 67 second video to finally mention anything about dogs.
I agree, I think it is absolutely wrong to use a celebrity and make her sexually appealing, and then compare her to a dog being trapped inside a car, all for the purpose of attracting more viewers to this ad. PETA went too far on this one.
Even though I think they did not have any bad intentions when doing this commercial, I do believe it is not really ethical to do. Used a woman as a sample for what a dog would suffer is not nice to see. The message can get misunderstand by a lot of people and instead of really paying attention and think over the reasons why it is bad to leave a dog in the car, they will be thinking mostly about the woman and the comparison that this company is making.
I think this was not the best way to promote this, and that many people can see it as disrespectful. Therefore, the company should have thought about better ways to send this message.