Sexism at Super Bowl I - Jane Maas

Welcome Jane Maas, our newest MediaBizBlogger.

I didn't watch that first Super Bowl back in 1967. I was one of those rare women, a mom with two young children who actually worked fulltime. Other women thought we were kind of weird. Men felt sorry for us because we must be married to bums; otherwise we wouldn't have to work. I was using that Sunday to spend some time with our daughters, do the laundry, and write a commercial for Dove-for-Dishes, an important brand at my agency, Ogilvy & Mather.

If I had watched the game, though, I'm pretty sure that almost all the commercials would have been for products for men: beer, financial services, cars and shaving cream. And therefore all those commercials would have been created by men, as well. How do I know that? In those days, women were excluded from these male enclaves. The people who ran the agencies and the people who ran the client companies - - all men - - allowed women to write advertising only for "appropriate" female products like food, fashion, cosmetics and toilet bowl cleaners.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that a Noxzema shaving cream commercial ran in Super Bowl I. These spots were causing a lot of buzz in the advertising world. One of the first was simply 30 seconds of a man shaving. What made it sexy was the strip tease music track and the come-hither voice of a women urging: "Take it off. Take it all off!" Another Noxzema spot opened on Joe Namath, without question the sports hero/American idol of the day. Joe, in close-up, declared: "I'm so excited. I'm going to get creamed." Then Farah Fawcett proceeded to apply the Noxzema. At the end of the spot, Joe, cuddling with her, confided: "You've got a great pair of hands." All of us in advertising thought it was wonderfully risqué and wished that we had written it.

I'm sure a man wrote both those spots. If a woman did, and you're out there, please stand up and take credit. I'll be thrilled to eat crow.

Jane Maas is a former creative director at Ogilvy & Mather and Wells Rich Greene, and was president of the New York office of Earle Palmer Brown. Her newest book, Mad Women, is the real story of what it was like to be a woman in advertising in the sexy and sexist era of television’s Mad Men. Jane can be reached at janemaas@att.net.

Read all Jane's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at MAD WOMEN: the Other Side of life on Madison Avenue in the Sixties and Beyond.

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