Hornitos™ Tequila, a member of the Sauza® family, announced a new national digital and television advertising campaign designed to instigate a better night out for legal purchase age consumers. Hornitos will be featured in two 15-second TV spots that highlight the 100 percent pure agave tequila and the exciting stories that come about after a night out with friends and Hornitos.
There’s a lot of chatter on the various social networks at the moment as to whether or not this good for the image of tequila. Humour and advertising have gone hand in hand for as long as I can remember, so I personally choose to see the funny side of it.
The two videos in question are ‘Cougar Phone’ where a guy tells his friend he’s going to call the hot cougar from last night and ‘Doris’ where a throaty bartender helps a guy call in sick for work.
The campaign tagline is “Hornitos Premium Tequila. Purer Than Your Intentions”. Check out the two videos below!
I object to the recent ad for Hornitos tequila that I saw the other night on TV. While watching a hockey game with my two buddies, the ad came on at least four times in two ad cycles, and stood out as being especially revolting to all of us. Hornitos certainly does not hold a monopoly on vulgar, sexist ads for beverages, but the ad in which one twin brother sleeps with the other brother’s girlfriend is the most blatant portrayal of imminent rape of any commercial I have seen. The woman is about to be tricked into sleeping with a man who she believes to be someone else, which amounts to coercion and rape. Maybe the ad is simply be following its “nights of greater possibilities” theme to its logical and inevitable conclusion of date rape. The advertisers have really crossed a line here. This brand of exploitive frat-house humor isn’t actually funny.
As is true of all rapes, the woman is stripped of her personhood. We are told by the ad that the real “crime” of the storyline is that one man is taking the possession of another man because he is “cooler,” presumably because of his choice of alcohol.
The fact that throughout the entire writing, editing, filming and screening process of making this commercial no one seemed to have a problem with an obvious rape is deeply disquieting.