For some reason this is becoming the advertising trend, but is it paying off?

The infamous Gillette razors advertisement became a cultural flashpoint when a company openly stepped into the social justice arena. It was a polarizing event, in that the company wrapped its product around a message that essentially admonished its core customer base to alter their pattern of behaviors. Now a new company is encouraging men to a similar form of alteration.

Buffalo Wild Wings is gearing up for the college basketball March Madness championship with a series of advertisements to position them as a destination for fans. One ad in particular is…well, not exactly turning heads, but causing that tilted position your dog makes while playing a harmonica. Without any way to do it justice, here is the spot they just released.

https://twitter.com/BWWings/status/1106198395092373504

Some are understandably scratching heads over this, but there is actually a connection that has been in place. For a few years now there are men who have scheduled their vasectomy to coincide with the tournament, using their recuperation time to absorb some games. But B-Dubs has taken things quite far here, encouraging men to get snipped, and then sip, in their restaurant.

If it sounds rather odd to encourage men to neuter themselves before coming in to join a collegial atmosphere, and how any of this ties in to chicken wings, it is. The featured chairs are purely a stunt, only available in two locations in New York, and two in Los Angeles. Highlighting the procedure in this fashion has some resemblance to the PETA PSA that touted vegetables as a stamina enhancement. It also is a stretch tying it together with the food.

The concept starts to make a bit more sense when the source is investigated. The concept of encouraging men to turn gelding before watching sports was created by the advertising firm The Martin Agency. While the source off many national campaigns TMA also has asserted itself recently in the marketplace as a woke corporation. The company announced at the end of last year that it was replacing the male executives with an all-female leadership.

Before the #MeToo movement, a female takeover of an advertising agency’s leadership team would’ve seemed as impossible as electing a female president: Totally doable under normal rules, but completely impossible in a seemingly rigged system. But a lot has changed in the past year, especially at the Martin Agency, the 53-year old ad firm…was rocked by a public sexual harassment scandal last December. Two women have effectively taken over what was once a male-dominated company in a male-dominated industry: Karen Costello is chief creative officer and Kristen Cavallo, the chief executive officer. And now the Martin Agency is one of the only large firms in the country to be led by a female duo.

In similar fashion we have seen this play out in the spirits market, where Johnnie Walker scotch has involved itself deeply in the Women’s March. And, the infamous Gillette ad also showed similarities, as that corrective-male commercial was created by a female director, for an agency that had created numerous female empowerment-centered commercials.

Corporations are becoming more and more lured into the Get Woke mentality, and it will be telling to watch the marketplace reaction. For now, it will be interesting to see just how many men will respond to a female-driven message of submitting to the knife for the sake of comfortable chicken wing enjoyment.