As a woman in IT I would also challenge Larry’s statements about the level playing field. The participation of women and girls in IT is indicative how level this playing field is. It ain’t.

Professional IT services are sold by companies like HP, EDS, IBM et al without having to dress up women. Wether they be dressed up as nurses, doctors, propeller heads or monkeys is of no significant importance.

Larry is right in the respect that the acceptability is in the eye of the beholder. As a female in IT in a senior executive role, that may drive the decision making wrt to vendor selection in a certain direction.

I was intrigued by the many women whose message was “toughen up girls”. To me it says that for many women, feminism has achieved its goals – allowing women to have a playing field that is level enough for them to feel they are competing on an even footing and can therefore rely purely on their own merits without wondering if their outcomes are depressed by the “male” system. I know that’s not the case universally, and that there have always been women who rejected feminism. Nonetheless, one aspect of feminism that I believe caused its message to be diluted and resisted was the persistent presentation of what one poster described as the “victim mentality”: if you believe your circumstance is undermined by forces beyond your control, it is difficult to take responsibility for those aspects of your life that are not.

Where I am particularly encouraged by our stand is in peoples emotional reaction to the nurses. When attractive girls are clearly there purely for their sex appeal, as a man, you react to them in that way. You go over to take what they offer, but you do not engage with their offering. The response to our nurses was very different, with a high degree of engagement with the content itself. That is undeniable – you could see the evidence of that on our stand all through CeBIT. I’m sure that this is because of the context we placed them in. We connected their outfit with the message we wanted to convey, and that made it easy for visitors to make the transfer from being approached by a pretty girl to discussing products and services with a sales person.

Now I don’t deny that they were deliberately attractive girls in nurses outfits. How acceptable that is regardless of our objectives and contextualizing is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. Marketing is after all about getting attention. I am personally very comfortable with the balance we struck, and I think it fair to say that for our audience (male and female) the balance was not overly offensive.

Larry Bloch
CEO
Netregistry

Netregistry’s marketing is shady all around. Nothing new here.

At least we’re not seeing what we saw last year – girls in a Jacuzzi selling mobile phones.