Zappos Ads Featuring Naked Women!

I was recently just flipping through the new edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine and was shocked to find Zappos.com, an online shoe and apparel shop tagged as the “largest online shoe store” using a black naked women to advertise their products. After some research I found more pictures on line revealing that they are Equal Opportunity Exploiters of women’s images and it’s just plain wrong and ridiculous. What’s the world coming to? Why can’t they just show the shoes and clothes they selling instead of putting naked images of women out for public consumption? This is so

unnecessary.

The company which was acquired by Amazon.com and featured in most world publications, including The New Yorker, USA Today, CNN, The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, The Washington Post, CBS News, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and Forbes can do definitely do better than using a black woman wearing knee high black boots, holding a black bag and hailing a taxi while a dark haired Caucasian or Middle Eastern looking man looks at her or a Caucasian woman riding a bicycle or a naked woman running. Am I missing something here? Or this is the just the new low companies are happily descending to, to shock people to gain attention from customers, so they can patronize their products?

When the CEO, Tony Hsieh was on the Barbara Walters special, he seemed like a refined and reasonable gentleman and I’m having trouble reconciling the image he projected while he was being interviewed, to someone who would allow these ads, although I know the advertising agency, Mullen, would be all gung ho that these are the best images for the company, but either way, the company that’s paying for it has the final say and the company should have displayed better judgment and corporate social responsibility than to allow this.
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Being a Harvard educated young man; I wouldn’t expect this from him. I would expect him to be refined. To me, this is more along the lines of what Play Boy founder, Hugh Heffner would do. Unwholesome ads that objectify and degrade people are going unchecked and getting more and more prevalent. It seems like in many people's minds including powerful decision makers at ad agencies and companies, there's a blur between wholesomeness and unwholesomeness and they keep crossing the line all in the name of making money, to the point that they can't differentiate what's what anymore. As far as they are concerned, it's okay to parade the nakedness of other people's daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, wives, friends, cousins etc, because they are just objects they have no personal or emotional connections to, so I have a "Litmus" test to help them in their decision making process.

If a company is considering an image to represent them and they are not sure if they are crossing the line or not, all they need to do is replace the models in the ad with images of their own family members especially of the opposite sex. For example, Tony Hsieh should replace the naked models with his mother's, sister's or daughter's images, keeping in mind that the images will be made available to the public especially men all over the world to ogle at, fantasize about and even masturbate to, then he can reevaluate how "good" and "effective" the ads are now that he has emotional connections to those in it.

This ad and others like it displaying lewd images is very offensive, inappropriate and unnecessary. It’s just another example of America’s unchecked moral depravity that's contributing the country losing its moral compass and Zappos should be made to "Zap" those images. The debauchery of the times we live in is unbelievable.