3Com ad prompts criticism from some women
San Jose Mercury News - Published Tuesday, April 6, 1999
Some women disgusted by nude 3Com ad
Networking giant 3Com Corp.'s attempt to grab attention by putting its latest gadget in
the hands of a nude woman is drawing not merely glances, but also scorn.
The company is being castigated in feminist forums, peppered by telephone complaints,
mocked on the Web and shunned by Santa Clara County's transportation agency, which
refused to put the provocative images on its bus shelters.
The photograph of an unclothed woman curled up in a fetal position is on 20 Bay Area
billboards and dozens of bus shelters in San Francisco. Magazines such as Newsweek
and Conde Nast Traveler show other photographs of her nude back and front, her face
hidden, but clutching the device.
''3Com is such a great company. How did something this insensitive slip through?''
asks Peggy Taylor, senior vice president of PeopleSoft, a Pleasanton software company.
''It doesn't have anything to do with their product. People are making fun of them.''
The ad campaign is part of Santa Clara-based 3Com's plan to bring the Palm V, a
hand-held personal organizer coveted by the technology savvy, into the consciousness of
the masses. The ads depart from technology companies' usual focus on bits, bytes and
bauds and draw instead on sex appeal, an approach more typical of tobacco and alcohol
companies.
3Com isn't alone in using images of women, however, suggesting there could be a shift
in the technology industry back to its less-sensitive roots. A Network Associates
billboard on Highway 101 in San Mateo County, for example, shows a blonde woman
with long legs and a short dress who asks, ''While you're watching me, who's
watching your network?'' And Katrina Garnett, chief executive of CrossWorlds
Software Inc., created a stir last summer when magazine ads displayed a photograph of
herself in a revealing black dress.
As in that case, observers are having a hard time connecting the 3Com image with the
message.
The Palm ad, produced by 3Com's Palm Computing subsidiary, was the topic of
conversation at last month's meeting of GraceNet, a Bay Area group of women who
work in technology. ''It stereotypes the role of women as the object of desire, not just in
selling liquor, or pantyhose but computers,'' says Sylvia Paull of Berkeley, who
coordinates the GraceNet meetings.
Sizzle or steak?
''I don't know if they are selling the sizzle or the steak,'' says Laura Breeden, a Menlo
Park technology consultant to non-profit organizations. ''But it's offensive.''
The ad campaign, launched Feb. 22, shows three different photographs of a nude model
depicted as famous dancer Kate Hutton. (The model happens to be a dancer but Kate
Hutton is a fictional person.) The photos were taken by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, a
New York film director and photographer, whose most recent credit was the photograph
on the cover of Monica Lewinsky's book. In the ads, the model's position shields
private body parts.
No sooner were the ads ready than they hit a roadblock. Santa Clara Valley
Transportation Authority declined to put them on bus shelters. ''We felt our overall
ridership would not respond positively to its artistic intent,'' says spokeswoman Doreen
Moreno.
By displaying a nude woman, Palm Computing hopes to attract the attention of people
who have not bought a hand-held personal organizer. ''They've already saturated the
market of people who readily recognize the functional need,'' says Howard Besser, an
associate professor at University of California-Los Angeles, who studies technology
advertising. ''Now they are marketing it as style or image, the same way you sell a car.''
Range of protests
Indeed, says Liz Brooking, a spokeswoman with Palm Computing. ''We wanted
something that would be as elegant as the PalmPilot.'' Brooking says she has fielded
protests from both feminists and mothers worried about how to explain the ad to their
children. She declined to say how many people had complained.
The company argues the ads are tasteful. ''If you wanted to be sexist, you'd have her
like those images in car ads, slithering across the hoods,'' says David Hunter, of Foote,
Cone & Belding, the advertising firm that created the ads.
But the Simply Palm ads cried out to be parodied, at least to Jason Kottke, 25, a
Minneapolis Web designer with his own Web page. Last week, he posted a parody of
four salacious photographs of women holding the new Palm V and called his rendition
''Simply Porn.'' He posted the mock ads next to a copy of 3Com's ad, which he
reproduced without permission.
Within two days, he received a call from a 3Com lawyer, who advised him to take down
the company's ad and informed Kottke that he had infringed on the company's
trademark and copyright.
He complied. His fans, however, have copied the parody on their own pages.
Kottke's pornographic parody shows how inoffensive the Palm campaign really is, says
Brooking, the Palm Computing spokeswoman. ''It underscores how tame (the Palm
ads) are by comparison.''
Not everyone is offended by the mix of technology and nudity. ''I think that's a prudish
attitude,'' says Donna Dubinsky, former president of Palm Computing and now the
chief executive officer of Handspring Inc., which develops software for hand
held-devices like the Palm V. ''It stops and gets your attention.''
Other photographs in the Simply Palm campaign include a male technology analyst in a
suit and a leather-clad male lawyer on a motorcycle holding a Palm V. The ads are
beginning to appear in magazines but at least for now, the nude lady alone will stay on
billboards.
To cries that Palm is hypocritical, Brooking replies that a nude male is ''on the agenda.''
o~~~ O |
