Chris Hassiotis

The first thing you notice is her rear: ripe and ready and raised to receive—a spank? Something more? Eyes move from left to right, and there’s the uncomfortably overemphasized arch of a back, an expanse of bare and tanned flesh, a billow of blond hair. No head, though—odd for a woman on all fours. 

Oh, wait—her head seems to be inside of some sort of metal… box? Is her head in an oven? Is this some sort of suicide-prevention thing? Isn’t it a little sexual for that? Eyes keep moving rightward, and no, it’s no ad for girls going a little too wild, or for some new Plath-related event.

The Georgia Federal Credit Union, a regional, not-for-profit financial institution, wants Athens to know it offers low-cost home financing, and you’re looking at a billboard at the northwest corner of Broad and Pulaski streets. “Money doesn’t have to be hard to find,” the ad copy says. (There’s another one like it on Lexington Road, visible to westbound traffic just outside the Loop.)

What’s up with the billboard? In the past few weeks in conversations around town, we’ve heard this image of a depersonalized, decapitated, supplicant woman called “offensive,” “gross,” “ridiculous” and “misogynistic,” so Flagpole got in touch with the local GFCU office, which referred us to the Atlanta headquarters.

“We certainly did not intend to offend anyone,” says Kim Wall, GFCU’s Vice President of Marketing. “We wanted to use an image that would attract attention and get people talking. We have had a few phone calls, and we explained the process of the campaign, which is limited and we’ll be moving on to other images. But that is the only one we’ve received complaints about, I will say that.”

Other images in the same campaign include prospective customers combing through couch cushions, digging through hedges or using a metal detector to search for loose change.

“It is a stock photo of this girl,” says Wall. “It’s funny to me because it’s a girl who’s fully clothed. The advertising is of someone fully clothed. I mean, I’m a Sunday school teacher. It’s geared towards college kids.”

Credit unions are not-for-profit institutions, and are considered “prudent and conservative,” according to Wall; this campaign was intended to broaden the reach of the credit union’s appeal. It’s also the first local advertising campaign where GFCU (www.gfcuonline.org) has hired an outside advertising agency, Atlanta-based Kilgannon.

An argument, though, is that the woman in the ad is just looking in a dryer, and what else could you expect someone looking in a dryer to look like? That’s the thing, though; every piece of something constructed—a painting, a book, an advertisement on a billboard—is the result of a choice. And the choice to go with this decapitated side view could’ve just as easily been any other choice: an over-the-shoulder shot of a woman reaching into a more easily identifiable dryer; a woman sitting in front of a dryer, arms raised in exasperation; a shot from inside the dryer as the woman peers in to investigate. There’s nothing inherently sexual about the act of looking into a dryer. More than anything, doing laundry is generally un-sexy. And there’s not even any laundry in the background of the photo, so who’s to say this isn’t some oven and this some suicide?

Wall attributes the calls she’s received to unfortunate placement of the billboard downtown. People driving west from downtown and stopped at a traffic light have the right-hand side of the billboard obscured by the Gameday condos building. “The building hides the tag line,” says Wall. “They miss the message and can just see that young lady’s blue-jeaned behind.” She also says that the company acknowledges the potential controversy, but says that advertising is subjective. “I think about the Super Bowl ads where you may see one you love and one you hate,” she says. “[People] need to see all of them together to see their full story told…”

Representatives from Kilgannon could not be reached by press time.

Chris Hassiotis