Ads such as this have been scrapped by Virgin Radio.
Bowing to local pressure, Ottawa’s newest radio station has decided to pull its controversial “lock-up-your-daughters” advertising campaign from buses, billboard and bus stops.
To mark the launch of its second Virgin Radio station in Canada, Astral Media Radio released a series of ads featuring frowning pregnant women, along with the slogan: “Lock up your daughters: The gods of rock are now in Ottawa.”
The ads immediately raised the ire of many in the community who called the ads sexist and offensive.
Those objections have now prompted the station to pull the ads.
“We are part of the community,” Peter Travers, program director at Virgin Radio, told local media. “It was not our intention to offend anybody”
The intention, he said, was to mock the age-old cliché of groupie culture.
Some, however, didn't see the humour.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” said Laura Sparling, a graduate student at Carleton University who started an online petition against the ads. The petition had collected hundreds of signatures.
“How do we explain this to our daughters?” wrote one woman, who signed her name as Annemarieke Goldsmith.
Another signatory, Michael Bruneau, commented that the ads are “primitive, vile and shameful.”
Ironically, the strength of these reactions may have been a sign that the ads hit their mark.
“If it creates controversy, so much the better,” said Martin Beauvais, executive creative director of Zig ad agency, and one of the people who came up with the concept for the ads and pitched them to Astral. “It makes us part of the news and part of pop culture.”
“I don’t see this as a negative thing,” he says. “Rock and roll has always been controversial. So I’m happy [Sparling] thinks our ad is in tune with what rock and roll is all about.”
Beauvais said the departure from staid leather-and-guitar images in the campaign immediately appealed to its clients at Virgin Radio.
Travers objected to suggestions that the ads were mocking teen pregnancy, noting that the models are all over 21 years of age.
“When you advertise a rock station, there’s a tendency that your campaign becomes part of the din,” he said.
“Our brand is about being rebellious, being cheeky, being unique and different.”
Sparling’s petition suggested the ads “support the notion of women as property” and “portray men as sexual predators and potentially rapists…no effort is made to suggest that the pregnant young women were not raped.”
Travers said he has no problem with people thinking the joke isn’t funny. “But if someone says you’re implying violence towards women and rape, I disagree in the strongest way possible.”
Still, Sparling may have a point, said Eileen Saunders, a communications professor at Carleton University who studies gender representation in the media.
“The ‘lock up your daughters’ phrase does come from the idea that if men come into town, your daughters are going to be taken, and they’re going to be taken violently and aggressively,” Saunders said.
“I don’t think when somebody looks at the billboard they’ll think it’s condoning sexual violence against women. But the origins of that phrase are rooted in notions of sexual violence.”
The city had approved the ads for display.