In other words, by advertising during the Olympics, what you've proved in an equity-transfer sense is that you have a whole lot of money. And indeed, it was this message that emerged as the unsubtle theme of this year's crop of advertising. The spots I caught were massively overproduced, crammed full of verdant fields and indomitable oceans and people running with the sweat droplets coming off them in slow motion. "Why not cross?" intones a white-robed child in the Bank of America spots, as he marvels at the Golden Gate Bridge, the Spirit of St. Louis and other putative Bank of America projects. "Why not explore ... Why not triumph?" Why not spend $50 million to tell viewers that the future is ahead of us, the past behind us?

"We all sort of want to be that child who questions," explains a staffer at Bozell Worldwide, the ad agency for Bank of America. "It had to be 'Why not?' because someone had already taken 'Why?'"

Chain-saw-wielding maniacs, butch pole-vaulters boasting about girly new hairdos, lesbian couples adopting Asian children -- one can see why the question "why?" might have been in high demand. Many viewers were particularly curious in the wake of Nike's chain-saw massacre parody, which featured Olympic runner Suzy Favor Hamilton using her speed to elude a masked pursuer. The ad, which debuted on the third night of the Olympics, was promptly pulled off the air by NBC after viewers protested that it made light of violence against women. Even after the cancellation of the spot, commentators continued to pile on, blasting the ad and denouncing Nike for its insensitivity.

"Stupid ... ill-conceived ... repellent," declared Bob Garfield of Advertising Age. "A far cry from the inspiring and empowering 'Just Do It,'" agreed the Washington Post. On Sept. 19, Stuart Elliott of the New York Times approvingly quoted a reader who labeled the ad "disgusting and misogynistic." At a Women in Advertising awards banquet Wednesday, the ad was again singled out for setting back the cause of women. "The outcry still reverberates," Elliott clucked.

Nike, meanwhile, was left to splutteringly defend itself against the charge of being a woman-hating brand. "This notion that we owe all women an apology is certainly open to conjecture" protests Nike spokesman Reames. "People are going berserk. They're getting really emotional ... They're saying, 'We get this. Nike doesn't.' When the reality is that women are e-mailing us in huge numbers saying, 'I get this. I understand this. I understand what you were trying to do with this ad.'"

Personally, I thought the ad was funny. As Hamilton sprints through the woods, the killer gives chase, vrooming his chain saw in bloody anticipation. Soon, however, he finds he has to stop and rest. He squats on the ground, breathing hard. In his hand, the chain saw whirs uncertainly.

Finally, he whips off his hockey mask and heads home, clearly disgusted with himself. The last shot is of the sneaker-clad Hamilton vanishing into the moonlight. "Why Sport?" the title card asks. "You'll Live Longer."

Whew! While I liked the ad a lot, I don't necessarily disagree with NBC's decision to pull it. The ad is so powerfully shot that it evokes a primal response, thrusting viewers into a visceral experience not of their choosing. (They may have just wanted to watch a little rhythmic gymnastics.) But the shrillness of the response obscures a more interesting, and complicated, issue: the evolving gender politics of Nike advertising. As columnist Barbara Lippert points out in this week's Ad Week, Nike has long employed a double standard in advertising its men's and women's brands. Until quite recently, the ads targeting men were loose, playful and cartoonish, often tweaking or making fun of the very athletes they used as their endorsers. The women's spots, by contrast, were earnest, didactic, issue-oriented: "If you let me play ..."

With the "Horror" spot, however, Nike seems to have stepped down from its soapbox. Hamilton is treated as an athlete rather than as a "woman athlete" who must be self-consciously fawned over and empowered. According to Russell Davis, planning director at Nike ad agency Wieden Kennedy, the shift in strategy is deliberate. "It's one of those things we talk about a lot," Davis says. "There's definitely a shift going on ... At one point, it felt like here was something that needed to be said about women's role in sports. It was all about empowerment, and self-image, and 'if you let me play' ... Now women's sports are higher profile. They've got their own leagues, their own television deals. They're much more on equal footing with men. And the advertising is starting to reflect that."

While not all inequalities have been overcome, "we're now in a position where that empowering, challenging message has become a bit of a cliché," Davis says. "It's become part of the vernacular of marketing ... It's lost its freshness a little bit, especially when used by a brand." As a result, Davis says, "in the last year or so, we've injected a lot more humor, a lot more playfulness, in our treatment of women athletes. We treat Suzy Hamilton pretty much as we would treat Andre Agassi. The ads are fun. They're meant to be humorous ... It's not a role-model, 'go out and be like Suzy' kind of thing. It's more like: We have a bunch of athletes we love, and we want to put them in our communication. End of story."

OK, so it's a bit of a stretch for Wieden to spin a chain-saw-killer ad into a victory for postmodern feminism. Nonetheless, Nike's evolution away from "Our Sports Bras, Ourselves" agitprop seems a milestone worth cheering -- especially when you consider how mired other brands are in the same old first-wave formulas. Consider "I Enjoy Being a Girl," the Visa ad featuring gold-medal-winning pole-vaulter Stacey Dragila. "When I have a brand-new hairdo ... my eyelashes all in curls," the voice-over warbles, as Dragila hoists her body over the bar. Get it? Dragila isn't a stupid girly-girl who wears her hair in curls and has a boyfriend. No, she's a powerful, strong, modern, athletic woman! In the final shot of the ad, Dragila slings her pole vault over her shoulder and walks off into the sunset. "Damn, I'm good!" she says. Quick, get out that chain saw!

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