Felicity writes:
In regards to one of your contributor’s posts about the ITRA [Irish Tag Rugby Association] using ridiculously sexist advertising yesterday. I received the same email and also sent a complaint via email. This is the reply I got (from a man, surprise surprise):
Thanks for the email and your thoughts on our latest marketing
campaign. Apologies if you found it offensive.
The photo shoot was organised jointly by ourselves and our Charity Partner for 2012, the Irish Heart Foundation. The campaign focus was
on the heart/love side of tag rugby, which has featured very prominently in national media over the past few months, including a piece on Grainne Seoige’s Modern Life TV show about the number of couples who have met playing tag. We actually also announced yesterday in our weekly ezine about another couple who met playing tag rugby and who are getting married in May…so we deliberately took a different angle on previous tag rugby photo shoots to focus more on the social
angle of the game rather than the playing side.
This campaign deliberately has less to do with “regulation” and more to do with “sex appeal”. Hence the reason for the model Rachel Wallace, who incidentally won ICA Bootcamp on RTE last week, and the 3 lads from the Panthers team. The campaign was to appeal to the non-tag rugby playing public, as posters featuring the models in
different poses are now in pubs and work places all over the country. We felt that a focus on the social side of the game would appeal more
to non-players. There are hundreds of photos on our website and Facebook page of female (and male) tag players, and we publish these on our weekly via our Venue Pages Photo Gallery and regular updates on Facebook, and these are also very popular with players. Thus far, both the feedback from people having noticed the ads/posters and the numbers signing up to our individual “Join a Team” service, would support the fact that the campaign has achieved its goal of appealing to the non-tag rugby playing community. Hopefully this explains our reasoning behind the campaign.
