ADS SHOW EYEGLASSES AS BARE NECESSITY FOR FASHION
By Adnews Staff
A new eyewear retailer is trying to carve itself a niche in the Canadian market, starting with some eyebrow-raising creative. Goldstein + Son opens today in downtown Toronto as a single store, but with much grander ambitions. The owners intend to set up an international franchise operation, says Dean Black, president of the new company's ad agency, K.D. Black & Company. The people running the new venture are president Sandra Cowan, formerly manager of a Josephson Opticians store in Toronto, and optician Joanne Bélanger. Goldstein + Son intends to establish itself as a high-end operation putting an emphasis on glasses as a fashion accessories, with people keeping a number of pairs for different occasions. The company is going after product placements in movies. The original creative for launch advertising in transit shelters was nixed by Mediacom which feared the City of Toronto might use it as a reason to require that all transit ads be vetted by city officials. Also, the Canadian Advertising Federation pronounced the ads in violation of gender portrayal guidelines which say that people must not be portrayed as primarily sexual, and that a woman's sexuality must not be displayed in order to sell a product that has no relation to sexuality. Originally, the campaign consisted of two teaser ads, one showing a man and the other a woman, in which both people were nude with black bars covering their privates parts and their faces. In the second set of ads, the bars were removed from the faces, showing them wearing glasses. Both sets of ads had the headline "All You need To see." The agency ended up replacing the lower bars with large black dots that covered most of the models' bodies for the transit ads. But they have sent out insertions orders run the original creative in newspapers and are now awaiting the newspapers' response.