Una Wiener is Chief Creative Officer at Young & Rubicam in Vienna. Through an industry blog, she conducted a large-scale, non-representative study on the topic, «Do women create a different kind of advertising than men?» She has now published the results. Men believe—at least according to Wiener’s survey—that there is no difference. Women believe that women are better. Well, it’s true that many women are better in some respects—they’re more sensible, more discerning, and more creative. The majority of women cite the usual reasons (gut feeling, intuition, emotion) and accuse men of being harsh, unnecessarily authoritarian, overly direct, or grotesquely frivolous.
One of the questions was: What could female advertisers do differently? The fairly unanimous answer was: Nothing, except talk less. One of the study participants had a particularly great tip: Women should «re-examine the concept.» That made sense to Una Wiener, too; now she sometimes just throws out the question: «What exactly is this supposed to be—a brand idea, a consumer benefit, or a core value?» She says this is actually always appropriate and highlights a woman’s spirit of contradiction. Previously, she would often launch the campaign first and write up the concept afterward—a tendency Wiener attributes to «female logic.» To a certain extent, she could also understand the observation that women on the client side come across as far more unpleasant than their male counterparts when, in the absence of concrete criteria, they insist that they “don’t feel emotionally addressed.”.
A conciliatory note to conclude: There’s really no one who isn’t happy that advertising agencies also have women on their staff. Advertisers are happy about it (see “Green Plants”), and clients are happy about it—at least in Una Wiener’s home country of Austria, there’s hardly any reason for clients to complain about a lack of expertise, since very few medium- and long-range missiles or penis enlargement products are advertised.
