Join Our Currently All-Male Panel, Please!
Image by Lior Zaltzman
Dear Ms. Sheila Edelman,
We are pleased to invite you to join our panel “Digital Advertising: Interpreting the Data and Rethinking the Agenda” which will take place on June 18th at the Hilton Hotel 5th floor Conference Suite. As the Marketing Coordinator for Snarkle Beverages© who specializes in ecommerce and CEO optimization, we’re confident that you can bring knowledge, depth and new and exciting dimensions to our esteemed panel. Please join us for a special day of sharing ideas and state-of-the-art innovations.
You might notice that we have sent this invitation a week before the panel is scheduled to meet. We apologize for the belated notice and we sincerely hope that our failure to invite you earlier will not dissuade you from adding your name and headshot to our well-regarded panel.
In case there is any doubt, we would greatly appreciate if you would agree to partake in our event. This year, our panel participants include:
Gavin Beck, Senior vice-president of Machman Media©
Jeffrey Werner, Brand Manager of Paterish Games©
Arnie Plimpton, Creative Strategist at Potent Agency©
Bill Sherman, Promotions Supervisor at Ttron Ltd©
We’re obviously honored to have such a respected group of professionals joining our panel. Indeed, we were pretty excited about the whole thing until we printed the flyers advertising the event which include headshots of our venerated panel members. It was only then that we realized something was amiss. You can imagine our consternation as it slowly dawned on all of us what we’d done, and more particularly, what we’d failed to do. So while those mentioned above certainly constitute a worthy list which represents a wide range of advertising professions and who will no doubt engender a lively and fascinating discussion about digital advertising, we concluded that our panel would simply not be complete without your participation.
In short, please, please, please join our currently all-male panel.
We would very much like a woman on our panel. We really want you. Wait, that was the wrong word. Please rest assured we do not use the word “want” in any way that suggests inappropriate and unreciprocated desire. Our wish to have you join our panel is simply an effort on our part to avoid the guaranteed embarrassment of correctly being identified as a bunch of antediluvian blockheads.
Our flyer – the physical copies of which are now being shredded while its digital record is being erased to the best of our ability – is like a badge of shame to us, the panel’s organizers. Indeed, anyone who’s bothering to pay attention will look at the pasty faces of our panel members and be reminded what a crusty bunch of white tadgers we all are. Needless to say, there are also no people of color on our panel.
We’ve been trying to address this oversight in recent days, however, we suspect that our email invitations thus far have been too subtle and serene to convey our true state of desperation. We realized that the time has come to make ourselves vulnerable in order to get our needs met.
In short, we are begging you to join our panel. We will do anything. Free food. Free drinks. Boozy ones too. We can provide babysitting if that’s an issue, but we are in no way suggesting that we assume you have children or have even have ever had sex – not that you’re unattractive! And God forbid that anyone should get the idea that we think women must procreate in order to be fulfilled. No! Look at Dolly Parton and Condoleezza Rice! We have ergonomic swivel chairs to ensure your absolute comfort but we are not intimating that you look old, or that you are old, or implying that if you were older it would make you a less respected and desirable professional in your field. Oh fuck, we used the word desire again. This isn’t going well. Won’t you please help us? We understand there are better causes out there but if you could just throw a little compassion our way, we’d just be eternally grateful and also so fucking relieved.
We look forward to hearing from you. Please say yes.
Sincerely,
The “Digital Advertising: Interpreting the Data and Rethinking the Agenda” panel organizer blockheads.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
