MediaApril 24, 2019

The absurd history of period advertising in New Zealand

Senior writer

Alex Casey takes a look back at the period ads of the late 90s and early 2000s, with the help of advertising guru Jill Brinsdon.

These days I can time my targeted ads for menstrual products like clockwork. Period trackers, bleedable underwear and menstrual cups all flood in on Facebook and Instagram several days before my cycle is supposed to start. On day three or four, that’s when the Clear Blue pregnancy test ads start rolling in. The rest of the time: chocolate. And engagement rings. Take the bloody hint, fertile woman! Time to shack up and start reproducing!

While it’s concerning that my telephone knows my uterus better than I do, it’s a hell of a lot better than the spritely sanitary ads of the 90s and early 2000s. Growing up, advertising taught me that a period was a secret. And something about wings. Lovely big, sticky wings, attached to huge pads that could soak up approximately one litre of blue liquid. You can wear them under skinny jeans! But don’t talk about them! Wear a tampon with a white bikini! But also shhhh!

[A note: There is a question in the above interview which implies that men don’t get periods. I apologise for my poor phrasing – trans men and non binary people deal with the realities of menstruation as well.]

Jill Brinsdon, rumoured to be the first female creative director in New Zealand, knows how that particular extra absorbent cotton sausage of period advertising is made. “If you watch most of those old ads now, you can actually see the research fingers all over them,” she says. “Also, very few would have been made or conceived by women. There’s a lot more in creative departments now, but in the 90s and early 2000s they would have been authored by mostly dudes.”

“You see a real formula. There’s a problem, there’s a potential solution, then there’s an actual solution and a happy customer at the end.” Watching as many period ads as I could find while researching for episode one of On the Rag, I started to see another set of patterns emerging. Sorting the most memorable ads into five categories (and one bonus round for fun), I took my findings to Jill for scientific analysis.

GENRE #1: WHITE WOMEN IN WHITE

According to these ads, the only people who have periods are thin white women. We know this isn’t the case, just as we know that nobody in their right mind would wear a white swimsuit when they’re well and truly in the red zone. “They would have done about $250,000 worth of research here to find out that we want to feel safe, so they put her in a white outfit,” says Jill. “If she’s in white, she’s not bleeding out. She would really be wearing red togs or dark togs, but that’s not the Carefree life, I guess.”

This ad left Jill more confused than anything, yet another instance of reckless white tog wearing and a bizarre Animorphs reveal. “Tiny wee bikinis for tiny wee tampons and a tiny wee period,” she says. “I think it’s really weird that she slips her robe on and then it cuts to this little tampon in its silk sheath. What does it mean?” I’ll tell you what it means: more unrealistic body standards for women.

GENRE #2: BOYFRIENDS ARE DUMMIES

“The period is a marvellous mystery to many, many men,” says Jill, “so I can understand there being some discomfort and ads trying to change that role.” The definitive dummy boyfriend is in Libra invisible pad ad, a hapless mister who adorns himself with sanitary pads to create a range of high fashion runway looks. Shantay, you stay.

“I guess what this ad is saying is: if it sticks on his t-shirt then it will stick on your undies,” says Jill. “I’d be telling him to buy me the next lot, because that’s about $12 worth wasted, mate.”

Libra’s ‘The Comparison’ ad, where another hapless boyfriend compares tampon size to penis size, felt more like an attempt at securing an award rather than selling a product, says Jill. “They’ve broken out from the dross here, but I find it really hard to imagine a woman watching that and feeling like it’s talking to them as the target audience.” Speaking of target audiences, who can forget the time pads became a solution to a leaky waterbed?

GENRE #3: PUSSIES AND BEAVERS

A really easy way to stop thinking about humans bleeding periodically from their orifices is to not have humans involved at all. Why not use a funny beaver like in the Mel Gibson movie? Lets get that critter oogling men on the beach! Lets get that critter using a pad like a loofah! Or perhaps an eye mask? Don’t think about genitals. Don’t think about genitals. Look at the funny beaver.

This one could fall under the hapless boyfriend genre, but also embraces the use of a cute kitten to make the central concept more palatable. “Does the cat really need nine tampons to play with?” asks Jill. “What do they want me, the person at home, to learn? That tampons aren’t icky? That they are normal? At least there are some things in this ad that I can relate to. When you get your period you never have a tampon around, so there’s a lovely truth there.”

GENRE #4: ANYTHING BUT BLOOD

The most important rule of period ads to never show a drop of blood. The most typical replacement, which has now become a joke in itself, is the use of a glowing blue liquid. Observe it here, dropping from a great height to be absorbed into some voluptuous silky tampon wings. The angel’s share, in a way.

“It’s creating a clinical, test-like environment,” says Jill. “If it was me conceiving it, I’d be looking at the colour wheel and looking at my options. You wouldn’t make it green because it would be like a martian or Shrek period. You wouldn’t go into the colours of blood because it’s too primal. So at the other end of the colour spectrum, opposite red, is blue.”

And who can forget the time that a woman used a pad to soak up literal dog wee? Classic. “Pee!” exclaimed Jill. “So dog urine is okay to show, but blood is not. The makers of this ad would have needed to find a fresh way to show the products absorbency and its ease, and I think it’s a great example of that. It’s also a bit of girl power without the togs and the running down the beach. Hats off to them.”

GENRE #5: LET’S GET ACTIVE

The final (and most enduring) genre of period ad is The Active Woman, the one who can take her period to a music festival or out for a night on the town, or to boot camp (or is it?) with the bestie. “The research would show that we want to still be active,” says Jill. “That’s why everyone who wears a tampon can suddenly windsurf or jetski – I’ve always been very disappointed that I can do neither of those things when I wear a tampon.”

BONUS GENRE: CELEBRITIES BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS

Louise Wallace made her money the old fashioned way: she starred in an Australian tampon ad in the 80s.

Courtney Cox in this Tampax ad is enough to make you… Scream

And I’d bet this tampon weighed… 21 Grams….

Watch the first episode of On the Rag below, made with the support of NZ On Air:

Keep going!

Larry Williams fending off a drone (Image: Newstalk ZB)

MediaApril 19, 2019

Newstalk ZB’s unsentimental giant signs off with a tear in his eye

Alex Braae

Staff Writer

Larry Williams fending off a drone (Image: Newstalk ZB)

Long-serving Newstalk ZB Drive host Larry Williams has hung up the headphones at Newstalk ZB, where has been at since the Palaeolithic era. Alex Braae tunes in for the farewell broadcasts.

Jack Tame and David Farrar were on The Huddle with Larry Williams for the last time on Wednesday. They’d been a relatively regular pairing, picking over the respective issues of the day for the evening commute. That night it was, of course, capital gains.

The news was coming up, and they had to go to a break. Jack Tame briefly broke out of his regular stride. “Hey, I’ll miss you Larry, see you soon.” Larry responded by thanking him, and saying Jack was a brilliant broadcaster. The moment lasted all of ten seconds – Larry always keeps it moving.

He thanked David Farrar too for all his contributions to the show, which have been vast. “Thank you Larry, enjoy a capital gains free retirement,” said David. It got a laugh.

Larry’s off. After 27 years, he’s finally finishing one of Newstalk ZB’s seemingly permanent shows. It always rates solidly. You get people when they’re in a mood to listen. And throughout that time, he’s basically been doing exactly the same thing. That’s not bad – John Grisham has sold a lot of books. It’s not exactly controversial to say that ZB’s strategy is to monetise having large and targeted audiences. And for decades now, that has been Larry.

Well, it has been the Larry Williams Drive show at least. His current producer Laura Beattie, formerly Kneer, is a self described “brutally efficient German”. That rather minimises how she puts together basically a perfect product every day, within the format of a commercial talk drive show.

Laura Beattie isn’t even the only Laura to have mastered the job. Heathcote and Smith before her did the same. Two producers before them did more than a decade each. Jobs on the show have been where some excellent journalists and producers have really excelled. And being consistent is actually rather difficult. Larry’s consistency is largely built on the relentlessness of those around him. He’s always well prepared, and he uses it.

Mayor Phil Goff praised him. Larry thanked him – “yeah, we’ve had some fun times” – and then cut him off to get to a break. Throughout the show, there were various farewells. All were accepted warmly and briskly dispatched. It’s unlikely anyone was too bothered by the lack of sentimentality. Anything else would have been inconsistent.

The show did typically well in the latest survey. Station boss Jason Winstanley came on before six to pay tribute, and summed up what he delivered in the space of a sentence. “You go out number 1 in Auckland, and number 1 in the country.” That matters hugely as a commercial selling point. During his final ad-libs with long term clients over the week, Larry had a bit of a nudge over how good the show had been for sales. They all agreed effusively, and it’s probably true.

Some people in the public love it. Many are benignly indifferent. Some absolutely hate it. Larry Williams and the show might be listened to by easily enough people to be commercially viable, but it’s still pretty polarising. Many think he’s biased, and he obviously is in his opinions, but arguably isn’t in most of his interviews. He shares many of the views people associate with the wider station. He’s flinty. Relatively speaking, he’s quite hard right on some issues, often calling for tough measures to be imposed on whomever or whatever. Sometimes targets are picked for a pointed comment or a sneer. I personally probably agreed with him about once a year, possibly twice.

Larry Williams in a promo shot, some time in the distant past.

Whoever takes over the job is in for a difficult start, simply by the sheer unusualness of having someone new in. There’s a pretty wide range of contenders. It’s wild speculation, but people talk most about Heather du Plessis-Allen, who is currently hosting ZB mornings in Wellington. She got a strong rap across the knuckles by the Broadcasting Standards Authority for her comments about Pacific nations being leeches. She also appeared on The Huddle on the final night and delivered a perfectly timed set of punches. That’s pretty much the job – just doing that all the time – and she’s good at it.

The field is a bit larger than just her, of people at the station who might have a chance. Jack Tame recently stopped doing a daily TV show, to start doing one night a week on Q+A. He also hosts a Saturday morning show on ZB. Andrew Dickens is finishing up Afternoons soon, and did some recent fill-in hosting on Drive along with Heather du Plessis-Allen. Chris Lynch in Christchurch regularly gets asked to fill in. There could be a leftfield choice in the company, or the net could be cast a lot wider and someone entirely new brought in.

But for the station there is a clear changing of the on-air guard happening. Leighton Smith has also finally stepped away, and there have been quite a few new shows over the last two years. Some of has been shuffling, and a lot of it has taken place in less high profile slots – for example, Lorna Subritzky and Francesca Rudkin have been doing Sunday morning, and Veitch on Sport has been replaced by a pair of new shows. But in that time, every weekday slot except Nights and Breakfast has now turned over.

In a wider sense, there has long been a bit of a churn of Newstalk ZB staff. Anyone looking at the Telum Media Alerts, a regular email update for people in the media, can see how frequently new positions and resignations are announced, for journalists, producers, tech producers, news directors. Larry himself has been a relative pillar of stability amid all that, for dozens or quite possibly hundreds of people just trying to make their way at a radio station.

Larry will be back, of course. It’s an iron law of people who have been commercially bankable for a long time – they never really go away. Just look at Leighton Smith’s new NZ Herald column and podcast, or the Rolling Stones continuing to tour. Larry Williams has by all accounts wanted to retire forever, but just kept going instead.

When he finally finished, Adele was playing in the background. ‘Someone Like You’. He loves Adele’s music. He once told The Veronicas he liked Adele to open an interview. Finally, Larry was, just for a moment, sentimental. He sounded like a man who had a moment to say goodbye on his own terms, which so few get the chance to do. He sounded like a man realising how lucky he had been. His emotion for those who had been around him for all the years was deep and direct. He signed off with a tear in his eye, and went silent as the final notes of Adele hung in the air.

Then John and Adrienne from Magness Benrow smashed over the top of it, advertising a TV. It was a fitting way to go out.