With the ongoing waves of feminism crashing against our society’s patriarchal walls, feminism has never entertained this magnitude of cultural relevance since its origin- femvertisment is a term coined for the type of advertisements that are female-empowered to help with the third wave of feminism.

Storytelling has always been the foundation of advertisement, and as early as the 1950s, the gender biases and stereotypical role of women as either a tool of men’s desire, a household puppet, or a mothering sheep’s criticism to market them to men and late 1960’s-1980’s wave of feminism and their rejection of the objectification of women as male dependent and sexually exploitable. And these conversations gave emergence to femvertising-initially proclaimed by she knew media in 2014. 

This ongoing wave has been linked to pop culture, and femvertisment is seen as the movements’ ties to capitalism. The research available bring focus on one aspect at a time instead of the phenomena in its entire context; as a role in the representation of the women amidst this wave and their ideals, corporate social responsibilities, and corporate philanthropy,

there has always been this ongoing dispute of advertising being a mirror of our perspective or simply a mold for them, with the ” mirror” reflecting how we see women and their status in our society, the “mold” implying whether we feed society these norms into shaping their reality. Brands in this era face this paradox: to mirror or mold. Nevertheless, femvertisment had put a spin on it.

Brands now mold us by acting as an activist for women’s empowerment as the dove’s iconic “evolution” campaign in 2004 is considered amongst the first of its kind.

According to various interpretations, the tactics used are the use of diverse female talent. Women expect representation similar to their race, shape, age. The message should be inherently pro-female, providing the consumer with feelings of affirmation and self-confidence. They use scenarios to break the gender-norm boundaries: challenging the perceptions of what a female should be by portraying women in places they aren’t necessarily seen.

The most prominent tactic is downplaying sexuality so that they don’t downplay it but use it in a more nuanced manner. They are taking the narrative into their own hands, using sexuality to empower rather than a means of entertainment for men.

Let’s take the case on Nike for analysis. In the 1980’s advertisement, Nike states’ “just because you’re a nice girl doesn’t mean you can’t have evil legs.” Here they link evil to being fit rather than mean because that was the correlation present in pop culture, and the reference between being a mean or nice girl develops a negative correlation between fitness which Nike is trying to break a very patriarchal point of view with a typical Caucasian model.

Later in 2014, after femvertisment, Nike stated in their campaign, “a run with the girls shouldn’t hurt the girls: the narrative becomes about the women and her experience rather than the social imagery. It becomes about the empowerment of the women herself.no image-making or breaking, just her experience becoming the main object of focus. This time Nike went with biracial women to advocate for adversity alongside empowerment. And this drastic change in the campaign and context of the same brand is the result of femvertisment.

The responses to femvertising have been extensively supportive of its initiatives by far. Up to 90% of women are knowledgeable of at least one femvertisment campaign, which has helped them build a connection with the brand favorably in the association with them.