The trend towards female empowerment ads or so-called ‘femvertising’ has been largely celebrated both within and outside the advertising industry. In fact, the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity invented the Glass Lion to honour the work that positively impacts gender inequality the best. But with so many brands jumping on the ‘girl-power’ bandwagon in a more calculated than heartfelt manner the idea of inspiring real empowerment is at risk of being overshadowed by marketers with insincere motivations.

Sadly, this kind of ‘pink washing’ greatly diminishes the entire effort and has been criticized that it comes at the expense of real progress.

On the inaugural presentation of the Glass Lion, jury president Cindy Gallop said ‘We hope that this award isn’t the type of thing that sees wildly empowered women being wildly empowered.’ We hoped that this film would get marketers and agencies to think twice about using female empowerment strategies insincerely, by showing them how bad it can look when it’s done with the wrong motivations.

Jane St. chronicles the opening of a new advertising agency that is dedicated to exploiting the insecurities of women for the purposes of advertising.

Like any good satire we played it completely straight. We used our own employees to showcase how jane. st was the perfect way for any product or service to capitalize on the new trend of femvertising.

We meet some of jane st.’s employees like their ‘Chief Empowerment Officer’ and ‘Confidence Director’.

We hear about new strategic planning models like C-LITT, which stands for the ‘Core Lady Insecurity To Target’.

We see motivational slogans like “If She’s Crying, She’s Buying”, male employees undergoing intense empathy training, and a photo shoot for a new brand of shampoo for all types of body hair called Sylk, featuring a female model with very thick armpit hair and an extremely full pubic bush.

Industry (Adweek, Creativity) and mainstream media (Vice, Fast Company) praised the video as being long overdue. And while the video had only 270,000 views, the right people were seeing it, including the most influential female leaders in our industry.

2015 Glass Lion Jury President, Cindy Gallop tweeted: “When I say #glasslion @cannes_lions isn't about wildly empowered women being wildly empowered, here's what I mean :)”

Janet Kestin, co-creator of Dove’s “Evolution” said "The Glass Lion is about encouraging real change for women, not using "female empowerment" just to sell products. For marketers and agencies, Jane St is a very very good reminder of that."

In her article “The Last Word in Femvertising: The Pink Incredibilities of Jane St.” legendary Adweek critic Barbara Lippert wrote: “The point is that some femvertising is just as shaming, guilt-inducing, and manipulative toward women as it was in the big bad “Mad Men” era.”

Exactly.

By holding up a mirror to our core demographic (the agencies and marketers that have insincerely tried to capitalize on the female empowerment trend) we hoped that some would think twice about their motivations the next time they use those strategies. Jane st. was created to discourage brands that have nothing to do with female empowerment to stop pretending that they do just to sell more products.

The film premiered at Strategy Magazine’s Agency of the Year award show, which is attended by every top Canadian agency. This forum was used to launch the video locally before seeding the video globally with bloggers, and journalists who have previously written about the ‘femvertising’ trend and advertising in general.

Every year, Toronto agency john st. makes a short film to critique a notable trend from the advertising industry as a piece of self-promotion.

Previous films have included 2011’s Catvertising, a video about an agency trying to capitalize on the success of internet cat videos. In 2012, Buyral looked at how advertisers are achieving viral success simply by paying for it. And in 2013, ExFEARiential spoofed the recent rash of scare tactic stunt-based marketing.

All of these videos were light-hearted parodies meant to have a laugh at the industry’s expense and hopefully deter marketers from falling into bad habits like trendy approaches to advertising.

But in 2015 john st. decided to take aim at a trend happening around the world that was a lot more troubling.