Madonna Badger on her #WomenNotObjects Campaign

When you Google “objectification of women” and all that comes up are ads, and you are a woman… in advertising… it’s time to take action – something that Madonna Badger, a 30-year veteran of the industry and co-founder/CCO of New York agency Badger & Winters, is well placed to do. She tells Tim Cumming how her #WomenNotObjects campaign challenges the old ad adage that sex sells and shows that female objectification damages brands

When it comes to a life- and career-changing epiphany, they don’t come with much more clarity than Madonna Badger’s, which struck while she was reading East Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. On a year-long trip to China in the mid-80s, she found herself standing in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, rather a long way from her hardscrabble childhood in Kentucky, with a father in the US Air Force and a mother who was the brightest daughter out of the nine-strong family of a Newfoundland fisherman.

“There were millions of Chinese people around,” she recalls, “and over by this pagoda there was a Holsten photo shoot going on. Everybody was just the height of 80s glamour, and I was like, ‘What are they doing? I want to do that and live in that fantasy world.’”

Of course, advertising and branding are not fantasy worlds at all, but projections of desire and need that deeply impact every area of our lives, both in the public arena and in private. What advertising’s imagery reflects back to us can turn into a feedback loop with serious consequences, as shown by Badger’s groundbreaking #WomenNotObjects campaign, which uses hard data to prove that objectification is as harmful to brands as it is to the objectified. It has reached into the heart of the industry and been taken up by the Cannes Lions Festival.

“I did my fair share of objectifi cation all throughout my career. I retouched Kate Moss, and other young women. I had no idea of the potential harm I was doing. None of us did.”

Dropping the shopping for art

But in 1985 these were concerns that didn’t reach much beyond the world of academia. Madonna Badger turned 21 that year, on the Great Wall of China, and returned to the US determined to become a photographer, to work in the world of images. She had a contact in Temple Smith, head of photography at Esquire magazine. “She worked with people like Annie Leibovitz; she had personal relationships with all these people,” says Badger. She became Smith’s assistant, dropping her duties as a personal shopper at Tiffany (“I hated it but was really good at it”) to alphabetise what seemed like every photographer in the world on a Rolodex and was so intimidated by the competition (“I thought, God, I don’t have this much love for this job”) she turned instead to graphic design, mentored by art director Rip Georges.

Together they left Esquire to launch a new yuppie-era glossy mag, Allure. But the first press run was shredded by publisher Si Newhouse before hitting the streets. After a brief liaison with Mirabella magazine in its final days, Badger moved over to brands, including one that would push the envelope of what was permissible in terms of sexualised imagery, Calvin Klein.

There, her first act was to turn down a hypersexualised Steven Meisel photoshoot of Kate Moss and Mark Wahlberg modelling the brand’s lucrative blue jean and underwear lines. “So I put together boards and presented it to Calvin, and talked about how we needed to be more fresh, and a part of what was happening in culture,” she remembers. “It was a homogenised vision because it was a white vision, but it was a vision of what was happening in music and photography, and with young women and young men, and we had Herb Ritts and Patrick Demarchelier shoot the whole thing, and that’s how it got started.”

Obsessional messing with Moss

Was her pushback on the first, more sexually explicit shoot, the start of #WomenNotObjects? “No,” she says firmly. “I had no idea what I was doing.” She pauses. “But it was the height of the AIDs epidemic, and to show such hypersexualised images with disregard for what was happening in society, and for it to be sex for sex’s sake, rather than ‘How do I want to present myself…’ That [realisation] came from my gut.” Another pause. “Then we got down to the job of objectifying Kate Moss for the Obsession campaign. So I did my fair share of objectification all throughout my career. I retouched Kate Moss, and other young women. I had no idea of the potential harm I was doing. None of us did.”

She stayed with Klein for more than two years, before leaving to launch her own agency in 1994, specialising in fashion, beauty, luxury and lifestyle brands. Avon, Chanel, Diane Von Furstenberg, Godiva, Nordstrom, Procter & Gamble, and Vera Wang have all passed through the doors of Badger & Winters, but it was P&G that really taught her the ropes. “That was my MBA in marketing,” she says. “It wasn’t until then that I really understood how real fashion and beauty advertising worked.” She also dates understanding the importance of empathy over objectification to that time. “Beauty has a lot more marketing rigour to the work and the thinking behind the work, where it is going and why,” she says, pointing to seemingly minor innovations she introduced, such as adding Spanish to every P&G package – “Little things like that made such a huge difference.”

For Badger, it’s empathy, not money, that makes the world go round, and in beauty branding it’s not unattainable perfection you’re selling, but identification. “It’s about understanding her life and getting in her shoes, and understanding what it is like to be her. It’s that empathetic connection that is so important to us understanding people.” Empathy is a key mode of transport between brands and buyers and, for Badger, it really took off with the interactive revolutions of the late 2000s. “The greatest tool to use was the internet, social media and email. That’s where they lived and that’s where we needed to be to have those vital one-on-one conversations.”

Badger & Winters set up the Listening Lab, where creatives would go out and talk with real women in order to conceive and shape a campaign. For one of their clients, Avon, they asked a group of twentysomething women, would you wear red lipstick to ask for a pay rise? Even though it made them feel empowered, the women said no, they wouldn’t, because they didn’t want to be seen as objects in that situation. “So we Googled ‘objectification of women’ and what came up were ads,” recalls Badger. “All of them were ads. It was a lightbulb moment – we had just finished retouching something for a whitening lotion that just felt terrible and overdone. I called Jim Winters and said, ‘We can never objectify another woman again.’”

Mothers, sisters and daughters

Since then, she has formulated the three filters of objectification – props, parts and plastic (women as objects, as the sum total of their body parts, as objects to be touched up to unachievable standards of “beauty”). Badger also added the fourth filter, empathy. “What if this was you, or your sister, your mother, your daughter; how would you feel?” she says.

She brought that question to Cannes last year. “I gave a speech about the harm, hurting women through objectification, and how the reality is that we’re really hurting people, and we’re really hurting young children.” As a result, this year, the festival introduced guidelines for juries to counter objectification across all categories.

“Work that has gender bias, stereotypes and objectification of women hurts all of us. It hurts brands, and it really hurts women, so use your own sense of empathy as a tool for moving forward,” she says. And it has ramifications throughout our culture, not just for branding. “Until we are portrayed as equal, we are not going to be treated as equal, so this is one place to effect that change.”