AMBER LOVE 07-JAN-2011 My Google Alert for vodka turned up an interesting tidbit for me this week. The premium brand of vodka, Snow Queen, has a 2013 erotic calendar. This got me to thinking about a blog I saw recently which called out vodka companies for their gratuitous ad campaigns.

Skyy Vodka is one of the most daring with sexual images in their ads giving bloggers plenty of fodder. I still can’t forget the Belvedere Vodka “rape” ad that was quickly pulled and resulted in some axes falling in that corporation. So what is it about vodka that advertising directors feel is so sexy?

Personally, I think we have Ian Flemming’s 007 to thank for it. When Bond, James Bond orders his martini (pre-Heineken days) shaken not stirred, women swooned and men got hard. The repetition of it worked like a neurolinguistic programming trick that embedded itself in the minds of viewers and readers everywhere. YES, I ALSO NEED A MARTINI reverberated in everyone’s minds. If it’s good enough for James Bond to win at the roulette table and get the women to drape themselves on him, then for around $35/bottle, it’s good enough for the average Joe.

#ProTip: getting three olives in your drink isn’t good luck; it displaces the liquid even more so they don’t have to give you as much of the vodka you’re paying for.

The Snow Queen Vodka images for their calendar present high contrast limited palettes of pale women. I guess you’d never see a black woman on a mountain, eh, Snow Queen? It seems like SQ was attempting to create an erotic visual tale by crossing Zenescope’s Grimm Fairy Tales with Snow White and the Huntsman and dashes of Narnia and Vargas thrown in. If it were a cosplay calendar, I think I’d like this series a whole lot more but it’s a professional marketing calendar for a company that makes vodka not costumes, comics, films, or literature. I flipped through the post on The Spirits Business site and the collection confused me. They have fantasy genre thrown in with 1960s cheesecake pinup. The compositions of it don’t work for me. The image (shown above) looks like the “Snow Queen” character is practically force feeding the other woman dressed in all black. All I could think about while looking at it was that the girl receiving the vodka bottle looked like a goose before forcibly fattened up for paté. The two characters clash too much for me to fully appreciate the level of costuming and photography put into this.

A composition that would have looked better would be a Snow Queen battling with a Fire Queen or a Snow Queen luring (zomg!) a MAN. Instead, this presentation falls into the mediocre “two-chicks-almost-kissing-but-won’t-fuck-up-their-lipstick” category.

Instead of something that tells a decent visual story, you get a woman in post-coital ecstasy with a swan, a woman in a bubble bath, and for feminist comic fans everywhere…. wait for it…. a woman in a refrigerator! 

Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.