Lady Geek

While I was in Germany recently, I noticed a campaign by Saturn, a retailer specialising in technology, called ‘We love technology! We hate expensive!’. This alludes to that technology bought at Saturn is allegedly cheaper.

What I found particularly intriguing is that they selected a female cyborg – a mixture of human and technology not unlike Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager – for their campaign. This character is a naked, slender and conventionally attractive woman technicised through lines on her body.

Saturn offers Screensavers for this female cyborg on its website entitled ‘you love her too’. The ‘her’ can grammatically refer to technology in German but also to the female character.

The musical elements to the TV spot come from Goldfrapp’s Ooh La La song but only the section ‘Turn me up’ of the lyrics is audible, followed by the slogan ‘We love technology! And We hate expensive!’.

One could assume that such a campaign for technology speaks more to men than to women but I would be interested in how other people read this campaign.