Santa Claus - Sexist

Advertising of the Moscow Bank was accused of Mizoginia

On December 13, on the television, cinemas and on the Internet, the rotation of the New Year's commercial of the Moscow Credit Bank began. The main characters of the five -minute video (on TV show the abbreviated version) were a little girl who lacks the attention of an eternally busy mother, and Santa Claus, who abducts this mother. Advertising, according to the bank’s idea, was to become a “touching New Year's history”, but is perceived as a sexist one. Medusa talked with the customer and creators of the video and tried to figure out what the bank wanted to say to its potential customers and what happened in the end.

The action of the New Year's thriller - it is in this stylist that a five -minute advertising video is designed - begins in a chic suburban mansion. A woman of model appearance nervously walks around the house and discusses her financial problems by phone, shouting to a little daughter; She lonely draws something, sitting on the floor. From the video, it quickly becomes clear that the child has everything: the best pencils and dresses, a robot-shit and a hoverboard, but she does not have enough attention-her mother disappears at work all the time. The girl writes to Santa Claus a letter asking him to give the girl a mother.

The wizard who watches the girl with the help of a video surveillance system decides to help her. He takes his mother from Moscow by replacing the driver of her premium car. Then Santa Claus leads his mother along the hanging bridge somewhere in the mountains. Then - drags on a rope across the river, swamps and a mountain ridge. In the final of this long and exhausting path, Santa Claus shows a touching letter to the woman with a pattern and text from her daughter. The heroine is sobbing.

The video immediately caused a violent reaction in social networks, and on December 14, a detailed analysis of New Year's History from the ICD appeared on the Russian Cosmopolitan website. In it, the video was called sexist. “The authors of the video tell us that a successful woman cannot be a good person,” the newspaper writes. The publication draws attention to the fact that the authors of advertising justify the abduction of a woman (“this is a noble deed committed for her own blessing”), violence directed against her (“An elderly kind wizard with the face of a maniac brings a woman to the mountains, connects her and drags her in an unknown direction, like a dog on a rope”), the heroine arose to the kidnapper ("Typical Stockholm Syndrome"). Cosmopolitan emphasizes that by their advertising the authors reminded women how defenseless they are, "society has the right not only to condemn them, but also to educate in their understanding."

“This is a clear propaganda that a woman who does not meet the signs of a good mother accepted in society - that is, does not sit at home and does not engage in children - it is necessary to teach and punish,” said Marie Davtyan, lawyer and expert on women's rights.

In the ICD, they do not agree with criticism. “We understood that the video would cause discussion, since this is not a classic New Year's advertisement, but did not expect that someone could interpret the idea that was laid in it,” said Nadezhda Levashova, director of the Marketing and Advertising Department. She added that she herself has a small child. “I would never have accepted a creative concept and would not protect it inside the bank if I considered it offensive to women and mothers,” she added.

According to Levashova, the bank initially set the task to the creators of the video to remove the story that the New Year is the time to think about the main thing, about the family, about close people, and give them time, attention and love.

In a similar way, they reacted to the scandal and in the creative agency 3SBA, which was engaged in the video. The author of the advertising scenario Konstantin Tokarev said that the purpose of their work was not to create a classic advertisement, “in which you need to sell interest”, but to make an image product, to create a festive history.

According to Tokarev, they deliberately made the mother of an extremely negative heroine. “This is an artistic exaggeration. This is not an ordinary advertising video, but in fact a short feature film, and even a fairy tale, because Santa Claus does not exist, ”Tokarev recalled. According to their idea, in order to degenerate, change, the heroine must go through a whole range of emotions: misunderstanding, denial, fear and, in the end, acceptance. “Santa Claus with a rope is a metaphor for the woman’s consciousness that holds her,” Tokarev explained. The creators of the advertisement also emphasized that they did not want to shoot the story of the humiliation of a woman: "The video carries a bright thought, and Santa Claus performs in it a harsh sage, like a monk in a Shaolin monastery." Tokarev adds that criticism of New Year's History testifies - the problem of working mothers really exists and needs to talk about it.

The bank refused to say whether they would leave a video in rotation or remove it.

Sasha Sulim