The Spot: We see a tennis player crushing her ground-strokes and serves; a gymnast throwing herself around on the uneven bars; a female swimmer, soccer player, and snowboarder each doing her thing. Meanwhile, animated graphics tout a new "no-slip grip" and "360-degree protection." Says the announcer: "Get high performance when you need it most. … Game time, anytime. New Playtex Sport. May the best protection win."

I am not in the target market for this product. (Rarely am I less in the target market for a product.) But I was intrigued by this ad because it feels like a wholly new approach to selling tampons.

I called up Julie Elkinton, vice president of marketing for feminine care at Playtex, to ask her about the thinking behind this spot. "In the past," she said, "we and competitors have played on the embarrassment factor. The hesitation to engage in activities because of a fear of leakage." This brings to mind the classic tampon sales pitch, which typically includes some or all of the following elements: 1) a high school hallway or classroom; 2) the cutest boy in school; and 3) the ultimate tampon portent—a snow white pair of trousers. (Alternate scenario: group trip to the beach in white bikinis, with cutest boy in school making a cameo appearance.)

There are some shades of old-school fear-mongering still embedded in this Playtex Sport ad. The scenes of female athletes in action include several crotch-centric shots, including a gymnast with legs splayed wildly and a snowboarder in a strained, midair squat. But the point is only partly that these tampons will endure extreme physical contortion.

"You don't have to be doing sports to appreciate the product," Elkinton says. This is "sport-level protection" (in the hyperbolic phrasing of the ad), so certainly you can trust it when you're walking with Travis to geometry class. But the subtler message here is that these tampons are for girls with a certain type of personality—active, bold, confident. The ladies in the ad are kicking ass. The soundtrack is aggressive and beat-heavy (lyrics: "Step up, let the games begin, don't back down, may the best girl win"). And there are no boys to be seen.

Philosophically, I prefer this newer Playtex message, which is less about preying on fear than about creating an image that's appealing to the consumer, and jibes with the way she thinks about herself. We've seen this shift happen in guys' deodorant ads, which increasingly emphasize slaying the ladies (see: Axe, Old Spice Red Zone) and don't bother with the armpit-stink scare tactics. But tampons seem like a tougher product to brand. Do women really want to make their tampon choice a part of their self-conception?

I looked around at current tampon marketing to see what kinds of imagery are out there. Tampax Pearl incorporates the word upgrade into its ads at every opportunity and seems intent on positioning itself as the posh, high-end tampon for the classier set. Meanwhile, o.b. has a more bohemian, earthy feel, with its boasts about being designed by a female gynecologist. (Tampax, which was the first patented tampon, was invented by a male doctor in Denver in 1929.)

But Playtex Sport appears to be the only brand looking to seize the active, athletic niche. It's like the Gatorade of feminine care. (And frankly, the first time I saw this ad on TV, only half paying attention, I assumed it was for a sports drink. Wait, I thought, is that plastic contraption some kind of sport straw? Ohhhhhhhhh …)

Of course, every brand also touts its superior technology. Elkinton can talk for hours about "tapered applicator barrels" and "a finger grip with flared grooves" and a "unique, double-layer, folded pledget." The other tampons play this game, too. I'm in no position to comment, but my sources assure me these high-tech applicator distinctions are fairly meaningless. In fact, one brand, o.b., has bowed out of the applicator race altogether, instead making its lack of an applicator its central selling point: "You control where it goes and place it where it fits just right for you."

Whatever floats your boat. Or puts it in dry dock? OK, I'll just stop.

Grade: B+. Elkinton says the target demographic for Playtex Sport is ages 13 to 24. It's important to reach younger tampon buyers because their brand preferences can lock in early and never change. Also, according to this abstract of a report on the feminine care industry, the market trends clearly favor pitching to teens. Baby Boomers are pushing the population bulge toward menopause, and birth-control users will increasingly opt for pills that suppress menstruation to a large extent. (For historical context, and some great vintage tampon ads, check out the online Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health.)

Advanced Search
Friday, October 19, 2001, at 6:39 PM ET

bushisms
Bushism of the Day
By Jacob Weisberg
Tuesday, January 16, 2007, at 4:02 PM ET

"Because of your work, children who once wanted to die are now preparing to live."—speaking at the White House summit on malaria, Dec. 14, 2006

Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at 1:29.

For more, see "The Complete Bushisms."

chatterbox
O.J. Confesses. Really.
The ghostwriter of If I Did It calls Simpson "a murderer."
By Timothy Noah
Monday, January 15, 2007, at 10:41 PM ET

Hello? Los Angeles County district attorney's office? Anybody home? O.J. Simpson has delivered what any sensible person must now recognize to be a murder confession. If it isn't too much trouble, could you start collecting the evidence—audiotapes, videotapes, manuscript drafts—and then figure out what to charge him with?

I've been told that Simpson is a murderer by someone who's in an excellent position to know: Pablo Fenjves, the ghostwriter for the book containing Simpson's "hypothetical" confession, If I Did It. Fenjves taped many hours of interviews with Simpson in assembling the book, whose publication NewsCorp halted as it was shipping to bookstores in November because of what I've previously described as a bizarrely misdirected public outcry. (It would be obscene if Simpson were to profit from the book, but litigation is underway to recover these funds, and the payment question was always separate from the issue of suppressing Simpson's potential confession.) Fenjves discussed the Simpson book with me on Jan. 15, the day a paraphrase-heavy description of the chapter detailing the murder, "The Night in Question," surfaced in Newsweek. The reporter, Mark Miller, calls the chapter "surprisingly revealing" and "a seeming confession in Simpson's own voice," and if anything, I think Miller's being too tentative.

Here is how Fenjves described his meetings with Simpson to me: "I was sitting in a room with a man I knew to be a murderer, and I let him hang himself."

This statement is decidedly off-message. "I would never suggest to you or to anyone else that the book is a confession," Fenjves recited carefully in our interview, like a prisoner of war blinking a distress signal in Morse code. He would never do that because "Mr. Simpson insisted on calling that particular chapter hypothetical." Obviously Fenjves is under some contractual obligation not to call this book a real murder confession. But Fenjves is plainly a little ticked off at Simpson, who, responding to the Newsweek story, characterized "The Night in Question" as a "created half-chapter" and proceeded to take a couple of swipes at Fenjves:

The ghostwriter of If I Did It knew nothing about the case when he came into the project and had to do a lot of research, Simpson said. The writer was not a witness at the criminal trial, as has been reported, Simpson said.

Simpson said he saw a number of factual flaws while proofreading the chapter but did not correct them because he thought that would prove that he did not write it, he said.

It's a matter of public record that Fenjves was a witness at Simpson's murder trial. Fenjves lives about 60 yards from the scene of the crime, and heard the frantic barking of Nicole's Akita as she was being murdered. (The book's publisher, Judith Regan, recruited Fenjves because he's done a lot of ghosting for her before.) It's entirely possible, but immaterial, that Simpson let the odd factual error slip by; there's no such thing as a nonfiction book that's entirely free of errors. The two crucial questions are whether the book's most significant "hypothetical" and previously unrevealed eyewitness details about the murder, as related in Newsweek, were supplied by Simpson, and whether Fenjves really thinks these details are hypothetical. Fenjves declined to give me a direct "yes" or "no" answer to these questions, but he did say, variously:

"I'm not in the habit of making things up in my books."

"What do you expect him [O.J.] to say?"

"The book has his name on it."

"I ask [the people I ghostwrite for] questions. They answer them."

What are these "hypothetical" and previously unrevealed eyewitness details? One is simply a matter of tone. The chapter about how the murder happened, Miller writes, contains

the classic language of a wife abuser. In his crude, expletive-laced account, Simpson suggests Nicole all but drove him to kill her. She is taunting him with her sexual dalliances, he says, and carrying on inappropriately in front of their two children.

Now tell me something: Would a writer-for-hire take it upon himself to inject a hateful tone into a narrative about the author of record's murdered ex-wife? Or would that ghostwriter borrow much of the author of record's own language to make sure that nobody missed Simpson's pathological rage? When I asked Fenjves whether he'd picked up Simpson's own language to establish the book's tone, he answered, "That's my job."

Newsweek's Miller goes on to write that the chapter describes Simpson getting ticked off at Nicole at his daughter's dance recital, and driving over to her house in his famous white Bronco. He brings a knife that he keeps in the car to ward off "crazies," enters Nicole's yard through a broken gate, encounters Goldman, and flies into a jealous rage when the Akita trots up and greets Goldman with a friendly wag of the tail. "You've been here before," Simpson screams. Nicole lunges at Simpson, slips, and falls, cracking her head on the ground. This last detail strikes me as implausible, but only as a description of something that happened; it sounds exactly like what a known wife-abuser would tell himself and others—particularly his children—to avoid admitting that he struck first with a heavy blow.

Goldman assumed a karate stance, according to Miller's description. "Then," Simpson/Fenjves writes discreetly, "something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened, but I can't tell you exactly how." Note the absence of the subjunctive tense. An additional intriguing detail is that a friend of Simpson's, whom Simpson/Fenjves calls "Charlie," was with Simpson in Nicole's yard. After a passage about disposing the knife and his bloody clothes—Miller is vague here, presumably because the authors are, too—Simpson/Fenjves goes into defense-attorney mode and writes that he is "absolutely 100 percent not guilty."

That Simpson ever suggested this project—the idea was Simpson's, Fenjves says, not Regan's—makes me conclude that a killer is coming apart at the seams. Before he got involved, Fenjves told me, there "was talk he was going to do this as a straight confession." A working title for the book at one point was not If I Did It, but I Did It. The title was suggested not by Regan, but by Simpson. What do you have to do in this country to get yourself thrown in jail?

corrections
Corrections
Friday, January 19, 2007, at 11:07 AM ET

In a Jan. 18 "Sports Nut," Daniel Engber mistakenly identified San Jose Sharks forward Jonathan Cheechoo as "Joseph Cheechoo."

In the Jan. 16 "Explainer" on frozen embryos, Melonyce McAfee mistakenly wrote that the temperature inside a tank filled with liquid nitrogen would drop once the nitrogen dissipated from the tank. The temperature inside the tank would rise.

In the Jan. 10 "Architecture," Witold Rybczynski misidentified the Hampton Oaks development in Fairburn, Ga., as the seventh community built by KB Home in collaboration with Martha Stewart. It is the second.

In the Jan. 4 "Explainer" about identifying meteorites, Melonyce McAfee listed two sources from the University of Indiana. The sources are from Indiana University.

dad again
Disinheritance
The sisters welcome their new brother.
By Michael Lewis
Thursday, January 18, 2007, at 4:51 PM ET

Once they wheel Tabitha from the delivery room to the recovery room, Stage 1 ends and Stage 2 begins. For the whole of Stage 1, a father performs no task more onerous than seeming busy when he isn't. Nothing in Stage 1 prepares him for Stage 2, when he becomes, in a heartbeat, chauffeur, cook, nurse, gofer, personal shopper, Mr. Fixit, sole provider, and single parent. Stage 2 is life as a Mexican immigrant, with less free time. Entering Stage 2, I know from experience, I have between 24 and 48 hours before I'm overwhelmed by a tsunami of self-pity. I set out to make the most of them.

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