Several years ago when Jeffrey Katzenberg was doing his full-throttle media tour to sing the praises of 3D cinema, a couple of journalists in the audience had the same question in mind: what does this mean for pornography?
Nobody, as I recall, had the nerve to ask Mr. Katzenberg the question, but the first part of the Rubicon has been crossed by the Brits, in a 3D advertisement for WonderBra. Bulging from a 20-ft. (6-m) wide billboard at Waterloo station in London, the ad for the new Full Effect bra, “Wonderbra’s best cleavage enhancer to date,” is all unfocused and muddy. To get the “full effect” of the poster (very droll, those advertising folks), cleavage craving passersby need to see the ad through 3D glasses. To further drive home the point, WonderBra posed a bunch of models in bras and 3DD (ba-da-boom!) glasses near the poster.
The rather wonderfully named Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents claimed the blurriness of the image would make drivers look harder and therefore cause traffic accidents. Driving around with 3D glasses on is hardly going to be a solution either.
Maybe everybody should be looking harder. There is no Royal Society for the Prevention of Warping Young Girl’s Body Image, nor should there be, but since 3D is a gimmick most enjoyed by theĀ young and impressionable, this ad seems, well, annoying. There have been 3D bra ads in magazines before, and the London Sun had a 3D page 3 girl (of course). But nothing quite this public.
The ad’s leering celebration of bustiness comes almost five months to the day after one of Britain’s most successful retailers, Primark, was forced by public outcry to withdraw a child’s bikini from stores, because the bra was padded.
It’s a bunch of mixed old messages the Brits (and let’s face it, Americans, too) send girls, isn’t it?