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Danish Tourism Commercials Encourage You To Bang Their Women
Like other cold places that faintly smell of fish, Denmark is having a small depopulation issue. Not enough tourists are popping in, and not enough babies are popping out. So in order to kill two birds with one stone, the country tried to entice foreigners to come over and exploit their greatest natural resource: hot Scandinavian women.
In 2009, a YouTube video went viral of a beautiful Danish single mother trying to discover the identity of her baby daddy, a foreign tourist she had unprotected sex with. The video received 800,000 views in just five days, and audiences were moved by her account of their romantic night, though she was but one of many women who wanted to show the tourist the famous Danish concept of hygge (their local precursor to Netflix & chill). But Karen wasn't making a sincere plea for a lover's reunion at all. It was actually a stealth commercial from the Danish ad agency Grey Group, one made on the taxpayer's kroner.
Commissioned by none other than VisitDenmark, the government's official tourism organization, the video was a brazen attempt to lure male tourists to Denmark with the promise that its women are all both pretty and pretty easy. The video was quickly taken down, yet Grey Group still defended their choice to pimp out the nation's women and boasted of finding a cheap way to go viral -- which is exactly the attitude you'd expect from an organization that promotes not wearing condoms. The sordid revelation spawned a slew of terrible parody videos, including one with the original actress getting it on with a fish -- probably a stealth marketing scheme to entice more merman tourism.
Nonetheless, after plenty of public outrage, the Danish advertising industry learned its lesson. Which is why, a few years later, they came up with a completely different tourism campaign encouraging Danish women to travel abroad and get knocked up over there instead.
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Bacardi Wants You To Use Unattractive Women As Props
For centuries, ads have shoved unrealistic beauty standards down women's throats to sell more makeup and diet products. But no more, said Bacardi in 2008, when it launched a campaign which assured women they didn't need all that claptrap to feel beautiful and confident in a bikini. All they needed was a Bacardi Breezer in their hand and an ugly girlfriend at their side.
McCann-Erickson / BacardiThis is either a broad satire of the misogyny in advertising or just misogyny in advertising.