Phone Ad Banned: Less Sexism With Our Tech Please

British advertising authorities have banned a new ad from phone company Kazam from appearing on TV because it includes scenes of blatantly sexist crap.

The ad, which is still available online, follows a predictable tech marketing trope: Here's a sexualised woman not wearing very much; now buy this gadget. It's the booth babe phenomenon in televised form, and the lack of originality and creativity almost makes it more offensive. It's just lazy.It's falling back on an old marketing device that wasn't clever in the first place and now just looks, at the very least, out of touch.

Have we really not progressed from this yet? Does the tech world still see women as just window dressing? (Judging by the continued existence of booth ba​bes, tech initiatives such as this site that crowdsources ​sexy girls, and game characters with unfeasi​bly jiggly breasts, yes.) Sex might still sell, but that doesn't make this kind of ingrained sexism acceptable.

The ad is so cliché I initially thought it was a parody, if a bit of a clunky one. But it becomes clear it's not: There's no punchline, no subversion, nothing remotely clever. A hot woman in lingerie saunters around to a suggestive song, stopping in front of a conveniently-placed mirror to check herself out. There's a close-up of her running her hands over her breasts in case the point that look this is a sexy woman needed hammering home. She pulls on her jeans, cuing more close-ups, then irons her shirt.

Only two-thirds through the ad do we get any hint that this is about a phone: The phone rings, she checks her jean pockets for it, then realises—ha!—it's in the pocket of the shirt she just ironed. That's the point: It's "the world's slimmest phone," an unnaturally breathy female voiceover tells us. It's unclear if the phone would actually survive an ironing in real life.

In case it needed spelling out, the ad is not shocking because it shows a semi-dressed woman. There's nothing wrong with a woman's body, and the nudity here is tame in any case. The problem, as the Advertising Standards Authori​ty spells out, is that she's only there to be objectified. This is not a lingerie ad.

The ASA wrote that "the focus on the woman bore no relevance to the advertised product." It didn't buy Kazam's response that the actor was simply "playing on a well-known scenario" of "ironing a shirt, in your underwear, before going out."

If you're unsure about the problem here, I find a good way to tell if a woman is being objectified is to imagine how ridiculous it would look if she were to be replaced with a man. Would you expect to see an ad in which a man poses in front of a mirror half-naked and slowly caresses his pecs while preparing to iron his shirt, coyly biting his lip all the while?

Don't be silly. Men don't iron! Not in the hideously gender-stereotyped land of tech advertising, anyway.

While this ad is clearly pandering to a male audience, it touches on some other gendered issues with tech marketing. It's unlikely a coincidence that a female actor was chosen to advertise a phone whose main feature is that it's thin. The association of women with superficial characteristics is another enduring theme of tech marketing. Just look at all the devices market​ed at women because they're pink, or easy enough even for dumb airheads to use, or aimed at helping women do women's things like shoe-shopping.

I remember getting a press release when I first started writing on tech about a phone company appealing to women customers—who, after all, make up a potential half of their customer base. They understood that women didn't just want a pink casing, the release explained. They understood that women wanted a choice of colours.

This ad might not be marketing to women, but it nevertheless pushes the party line that women don't care about or understand features beyond the most skin-deep.

You just can't imagine our sexy woman ironing advertising any real technical features of a phone. There's not a chance that she'll start expertly explaining the device's power performance or eight-core processor. (If this ad actually did that, it might make for a passable tongue-in-cheek parody, subverting our expectations of how tech companies view women). Instead she remains mute. While Kazam's site flaunts the phone "you'll want to wear it like a fashion accessory!" it's clear that she is the accessory here.

Of course, criticising the ad has the unfortunate effect of drawing more attention to the product—I'd never heard of Kazam before this controversy—but let's take it as a teachable moment.

Because while marketing tactics like this may be offensive to women who already suffer objectification and discrimination in the tech world, they're surely also insulting to the men they try to lure in with a bit of choreographed flesh-flashing.

If you can tell me why your product really is technologically superior? Now that's sexy.

xx is a column about occurrences in the world of tech, science, and the internet that have to do with women. It covers the good, the bad, and the otherwise interesting gender developments in the Motherboard world.