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Yorkie’s 2002 ‘not for girls’ advert has resurfaced and people are shook
By Joanna Sarah-Freedman
29 Aug 2023
2m
Sometimes you can look back at old adverts and just think… yikes.
Case in point? Yorkie’s ‘not for girls’ catchphrase, and specifically one rather cringeworthy advert from 2002, which has recently resurfaced.
The advert shows a woman being told she can’t have a Yorkie bar because she fails to answer a bunch of ‘manly’ questions.
She does well at the beginning. The shopkeeper fires off questions to the woman who has disguised herself as a man (fake moustache and builders’ uniform in tact) in order to nab the precious chocolate cargo.
You can watch the ad below:
The shopkeeper asks: “You’re not a man are you?”
“Explain the offside rule then…,” he goes on to insist.
He also asks the woman to open a jar, prove she isn’t scared of a plastic spider and state whether she preferred stockings of tights.
Whilst she manages all of these, she’s tricked into revealing her identity when he tells her the chocolate wrapper brings out the colour of her eyes, and she swoons…
The slogan of the chocolate the reels off: “Five big chunks of masculine chocolate. Yorkie… it’s not for girls.”
Yikes.
Yorkie’s 2002 advert was a shocker (Credit: YouTube)
Reacting to the video as they came across it on YouTube, one person wrote: “Can you imagine how this would go down today?”
Whilst another penned: “This so wouldn’t fly now.”
“These ads did not age well at all,” said a third.
Of course, others noted that controversial or not, it probably got women to flock and buy Yorkie bars in defiance, which was undoubtedly their aim.
Little bit of light sexism to sell some chocolate… casual, right? Sigh.
The noughties slogan was controversial, to say the least (Credit: YouTube)
If you thought it couldn’t get much worse, Nestle’s marketing director at the time, Andrew Harrison, released a statement following the ad’s release which said: “Most men these days feel as if the world is changing around them and it has become less and less politically correct to have anything that is only for males.
“Yorkie feels that this is an important element of men’s happiness and is starting the reclaiming process of making a particular chocolate just for men.”
Of course, we should mention this was almost 12 years ago, and Yorkie’s ‘not for girls’ slogan was dropped back in 2012, so times have very much changed since then.
Yup, you won’t find ‘not for girls’ on the packaging of a Yorkie now. Yay for feminism!
Featured image: YouTube/ Flickr
