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I Pitched My Marketing Class on the Diva Cup

by Jarrah Hodge

I was at least a little out-of-place in my Writing Creative Copy class last term. The course, part of a local college Marketing program, was taught by a kind but easily-distractable woman in her fifties with extensive experience in the ad industry.

Now the industry isn’t exactly like Mad Men anymore, but there’s still a lot of pretty bad advertising produced, including all those racist political ads that came out in the States last year, and just reams of sexist ads promoting anything from fast food to high fashion.

So how do you switch hats to go from being a feminist cultural critic, who spends a lot of her spare time analyzing and writing about sexist advertising, to being a trainee ad copywriter who is trying to learn some new skills and pass a class?

Turns out it was possible to do and have fun. It helped that the philosophy of the instructor and the course was to emphasize creativity. If your jokes and images and concepts came straight out ads you’d already seen, you had a problem. You couldn’t just stick in a picture of a sexy, half-naked woman and expect to get a good grade.

But I still had a bit of a block; a discomfort with writing even fake ads for products I didn’t think people should buy.

So when it came time to develop a radio ad campaign for our mid-term assignment, I sat down and I went through all the products I use on a regular basis. I wanted to find something I could fake sell without feeling like it compromised my ethics.

I picked the Diva Cup.

Now I’ve used the Diva Cup (a small, internally-worn menstrual cup made of silicone) with Lunapads’ washable cloth menstrual pads for backup for about five years. To me it’s no big deal. I learned about the cup from a friend in university and it just made sense. Why was I using these bleached, scented, drying menstrual products instead of this cheaper (up to $150 cheaper per year) and more eco-friendly option. Read more