I disagree with Kate. I NEED a better car. And a drink.

I have several problems with this. The first, as should be evident to people working in advertising from the background I provided on the campaign (and it was one of the reasons I provided the back story in the first place—since my blog is mainly read by others in the business), is the work wasn’t about sex; it was about boldness. Secondly, as should be evident from the radio example, the campaign didn’t target women; it targeted men.

Certainly, it didn’t target anyone who was underage. No sexy television, no raucous parties, no hard bodies thinking other hard bodies are cool simply because of the glint coming off the bottle in their hand. Just smart, adult copy lines appearing in smart, adult locations. To further adult-i-fy it, consumers needed to have prior experience with tequila to really understand what was going on within the campaign, anyway.

I would have been more clear on these points had I expected the post to gain extremely wide distribution through Gawker.

My presumption is she tried it at one of her (apparently many) keg parties, liked its boutique flavor profile and then backtracked for a reason why. She picked the two lines, out of the roughly twenty that ran, that were tangentially related to anything of a sexual nature and focused in on them, “because that’s what sells to women.” Magico-presto, it’s advertising’s fault.

Like I said in the post, advertising simply cannot hold a gun to someone’s head and order them to buy something. Advertising cannot make people do anything. The best of it provides a rationale for purchase that people can use within their own decision-making process. The worst of it creates a fallacy of rationale which thoughtful people are able to discern and discount. Advertising doesn’t mug people on the street. Only people who are willing to abdicate their own personal responsibilities—or those who feel they’re smarter than everyone else—seem to think otherwise. (I’m not throwing you in here; I’m simply making an observation on those who would damn advertising for every ill suffered by society.)

Why not blame advertising for my having eaten that quadruple-meat cheeseburger when it’s so much more painful to consider the fact I’m simply, and basely, a glutton?

Why not construct a boogey man out of advertising from which to lead the “sheeple,” prophet-like, when it’s so much more difficult to address the internal emotional and psychological inequalities that lead people to excessive consumption—of intoxicants, luxury goods, fast food, baseball cards, shoes, little black dresses, whatever—in the first place?

I haven’t deluded myself into believing advertising isn’t powerful; I know it is, just as I know that any mass media operation—music, film, the news—is. But I also haven’t deluded myself into thinking it’s more powerful than it really is because, if it were, every campaign that aired would result in 100% success and that’s simply not the case.

What gave me pause wasn’t the thought that my campaign was so powerful as to drive a young woman to drink—I know it wasn’t—but that someone would specifically call out my work as being not only a root cause of personal pain but also a deliberately sinister and premeditated source of harm to 50% of the population.

That’s something that, despite working in the evil, evil world of advertising, doesn’t happen every day.

I am so tired of ‘my parents didn’t love me’ or ‘I had a rough childhood’, so I need to blame something for it. And oh, btw, let me profit off of it. Well, that’s bullshit.

Know what? Way it goes. Your ad work has zilch to do with her life’s problems. Because if that’s the case, then I’d counter by saying she only has success because she drank all those years.

Kind of ironical, aint it.