S m s cakes

Nothing exceptional about this, except the ingredients of this cake included a female stripper with, apparently, a Louis Vuitton bag on her head. How very Trouble is, they invited the trade press and it seems they missed the joke. You would think that this requires ad agencies to have their fingers on the pulse of what is happening to those consumers and how they see the world.

The majority of purchases are still made by women. The figure of 80 per cent used to be bandied about when I was working in agencies. Yet Adland seems to have entirely missed what has happened to women over the last four decades. Either that, or they are still impatiently waiting for the whole feminist revolution to just go away. This is hardly surprising considering how few women there are in senior positions in advertising to enlighten them. Credit: YouTube. This actually worked to my advantage a few years ago.

I got a semi-regular gig on The Gruen Transfer because the producers were so desperate to find women working in the business. Generally the Gruen panel was and is one woman to three blokes and Wil Anderson also a bloke. I vividly remember being in the first episode that had a whole two of us vagina-owners on the panel.

Only a few months ago there was another public kerfuffle over the gaping hole where women should be when Leo Burnett proudly announced five virtually identical new blokes appointed to senior roles in their ahem creative department. Such was the agencies complete lack of self-awareness they were gob smacked at the outcry that followed. And, for me, this is the crucial point. Ad agencies are meant to be the communicators, the experts in image making yet, at every turn, for decades, they have revealed their total lack of ability to manage their own.

And this is where their clients come in. Credit: Michael Yarish. Those who control major communication budgets just need to insist that equal numbers of female creatives work on their account as a condition of awarding the business.

Within six months the ad business will have moved from to Not just in raw numbers of women employed either, but in understanding the modern world, the modern consumer and how to communicate skilfully, wittily and appropriately to them. Jane Caro is a novelist, author, commentator and award winning advertising writer. The Sydney Morning Herald. Replay Replay video. Play video. License this article. Jane Caro Facebook Twitter.