c. 2006 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ At the corner of East 56th Street and First Avenue, there’s an oversized phone booth that looks like a bus shelter with large advertisements on all three sides.

The ad facing south, toward the headquarters for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, is for Casella Yellow Tail wine, featuring a seemingly naked Asian woman with a long yellow ponytail. The ad is subtle and in-your-face at the same time: “yellow” (Asian) “tail” (woman). Yellow Tail. Get it? The caption reads, “Tails, you win.”

You have to shake your head in disbelief. But what can you do?

It is not uncommon to decry the subtle and not-so-subtle messages pumped daily toward the national psyche. Equally suggestive advertising on television supports raunchy situation comedies and steamy soap operas. Video ads are even available now on cell phones.

The new advertising frontier _ the boundary now crossed by Yellow Tail _ combines racism and sexism. The ad is just plain outrageous.

The yellow-footed rock wallaby, from which Yellow Tail wine supposedly gets its name, is an endangered species of kangaroo in Australia, where Yellow Tail wine is made. The wine label shows the wallaby.

The Yellow Tail ad campaign plays on the theme, first featuring a yellow-tailed comet, then a yellow-tailed lobster, then a yellow-tailed biplane, and finally a yellow-tailed mermaid. Given the lack of taste in so many other ads done by the Cramer-Krasselt agency, which has the account, the Asian woman was inevitable. That she appears to be unclothed only underscores the message.

Taste is not one of Cramer-Krasselt’s strong points. They are the firm behind the television ad for Corona beer showing a man and a woman from behind, sitting in beach chairs. His head more than swivels when a bikini-clad woman strolls by. She reaches over and splashes some cold beer in his lap.

Another memorable low in the firm’s repertoire includes two television ads for Hyatt hotels titled “Seattle” and “Chicago.” Fast cuts from sauna to massage table to bedroom to boardroom show people very close to each other, with just one thing on their minds.

Then there is the Careerbuilder.com ad, in which monkeys in a lecture hall dance laser lights on the crotch of the shirt-and-tie-clad human presenter.

Cramer-Krasselt is not the only agency to bring fresh tackiness to the world of advertising. Nor is it an agency that works for the low-budget crowd. In addition to Hyatt, Corona and Careerbuilder.com, its clients include Heinz and Ore Ida, Yellow Tail and HBO Video in New York, and R.H. Donnelly (the Yellow Pages people) in North Carolina.

Their vision statement reads: “To keep us open to the changes technology and culture bring, to keep us free to create and invest on behalf of our clients in any direction they and we see fit, and to keep us reasonably sane, Cramer-Krasselt will remain independently owned. As agencies were meant to be.”

Laboring without either good grammar or good taste, Cramer-Krasselt created the ads for W.J. Deutsch & Sons, Ltd., which imports Yellow Tail wine.

Then they placed them.

One can only guess at how much it costs for a glass-enclosed poster on the corner of 56th and First in New York. Or how much the agency charges for ads playing on a wallaby jumping across a wine bottle label. Or what they paid the models for being a mermaid or a half-naked Asian woman with a yellow ponytail.

While class and common sense do not figure in the mix, the pity of it is they are probably all good people. The ad agency employees, the models, the vintners, the importers are most likely upstanding citizens who pay taxes and vote and smile at babies. They are just so inured to the cultural smog that they cannot see how violent their actions really are.

Even the folks at Verizon, which stands to earn the most in the worldwide drive to bring pornography to a cell phone near you, are so numbed to the place of women in the world that they did not refuse the ad.

While the Asian woman with slightly parted lips is most likely plastered all over the city, in this instant she is steps away from the archdiocesan headquarters, and even closer to Cathedral High School for girls.

What are they thinking? And why is no one complaining?

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several award-winning and widely translated books in Catholic studies, including “Woman to Woman: An Anthology of Women’s Spiritualities” (Liturgical Press).)

KRE/PH END ZAGANO

Editors: To obtain a photo of this columnist, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.