Okay, what creative hasn’t, at least once, tried to slip some inappropriate headline or secretly vulgar graphic element into a project, just to see if you could get away with it?
Um, me either, definitely.
Realistically, though, every creative has a bored 12-year-old somewhere inside who needs out for a leg-stretcher. Back in my early days, I found myself frustrated with a magazine editor who changed my article ledes every. Single. Time, and I decided to be stupid about it, because he was just going to change it, so who was going to see it anyway?
There’s some mad flow all up in UAB’s Heart and Vascular Services department, and it’s not just the heart-lung machine will live on forever in Internet infamy.
But this isn’t about me (thankfully). This is about three campaigns that, no matter what anyone will tell you, started with a copywriter chuckling to themselves as they snuck in something naughty. And in some cases, I’m confident, they ended with said copywriter secretly aghast that said headline actually made it to print.
M.I.L.F. alert
We’ll start with one campaign that was definitely intentionally spicy, whether Spirit Airlines is willing to admit it or not. (Spirit has a rich history of walking-the-line ads and an equally rich history of wide-eyed, “Dirty ads? How dare you, sir!” when called out.) A 2007 campaign promoted Spirit’s “Many Islands, Low Fares” — and yes, it is abbreviated “M.I.L.F.” in bold yellow letters, and yes, the campaign promises that they are “hotter and cheaper than ever.”
For their part, Spirit insists that they had no idea, y’all, that the headline had any dirty connotations.
It’s impossible to know exactly what percentage of Americans are familiar with the slang acronym, but Spirit Airlines maintains that the executive who authorized the MILF promotion did not know the connection.
“Not at all,” Juan Arbelaez, the director of communications for the company’s Latin American market, told ABC News when asked whether the airline was aware of the racy implications. “We started receiving some e-mails today.”
Arbelaez said that Spirit’s senior vice president of pricing is a British citizen who was unfamiliar with the MILF terminology and that the airline is not trying to offend customers.
Airline’s ‘MILF’ Promo Not What You Think
One would imagine that, regardless of his Britishness, the senior VP might have clocked that the islands in the ad were arranged in the shape of a reclining, ostensibly nude woman. (Or maybe British women never take their clothes off and lie down? I have no reason to know these things.)
Knowingly naughty or no, the airline definitely knew what they were doing when they revived the M.I.L.F. campaign the following year. And in 2015, they launched a campaign that… I won’t describe, because I try to keep this blog SFW (although that ship may have sailed by this point), but I will say it involved $69 fares. So yeah. Totally innocent.
Gettin’ it
We all need the D. Doctors tell us how important it is to get enough D. Some people take a pill to get the D. Some people get the D outside on a sunny day. Men and women, people of all ages, need to get the D.
Okay. I’m done now.
(I’m not. People who don’t get enough of the D can experience cognitive impairment, heart disease, and even rickets. I can’t over-stress the importance of getting the D on the regular.)
(Okay, now I’m done.)
Clearly, the copywriters for this Yukon Department of Health and Social Services public health campaign knew what they were implying when they told Yukoners, “We all need the D. Even me!” (That headline was placed next to an image of a woman who, judging from the baby she was holding, was getting plenty of D.)
Disappointingly, the DHHS did later cop to knowing that “the D” has sexual implications — like, seriously, let us have our fun. Spokesperson Pat Living did say, “We did not realize that it was as crude as it is now purported to be,” which is a little better, I guess. I mean, slipping someone the D without their knowledge is absolutely not acceptable.
(Okay, now I really am done, for real.)
Totally on it
An excess of methamphetamine is, of course, more serious than a lack of D (the vitamin, you pervert), which makes it a little more questionable for a copywriter to mess around with the headline, which they definitely, definitely did. There is no possible way that this campaign’s copywriter wasn’t fighting back a snicker as they handed “Meth. We’re on it” to their CD for review. It made it, though, and last year, South Dakotans on billboards, in print, and on TV proclaimed that they were on meth.
Governor Kristi Noem insisted that the ad was intentionally provocative, saying on Twitter, “Hey Twitter, the whole point of this ad campaign is to raise awareness. So I think that’s working… #thanks #MethWeAreOnIt.” And… good try, Kris. If I, too, dropped $450,000 on an anti-drug campaign that implied my citizens are addicted to speed (ooh, I think I just came up with a NASCAR tie-in), I would definitely try to play it off like I was trying to be edgy. As an intentional attention-grabbing effort by Noem’s office, it would be incredibly tone deaf; as the work of a copywriter who probably didn’t expect the headline to make it as far as it did, it would just be a day in the life of a bored advertising creative.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is why it’s important to keep your creatives occupied and sharp. Idle hands may be the devil’s workshop, but most creatives’ brains are at least infernal craft cupboards on the best of days. Keep them busy, give them opportunities to really exercise their creativity, and let them outside from time to time to get a little bit of —
Never mind.