Dr Pepper 10. I may be over-sensitive about this subject, as I am a woman who participates in a fantasy football league (and wins, thank-you), but as an advertising student I’m just confused.

For the initial push of the drink, the commercial with the action movie narration sort of thing, I can almost understand it. It was a relatively entertaining commercial, and would have been more so if it had a different tagline but, again, over-sensitive.

See, from a strategic point of view, the “Not for Women” tag hopes that women will feel challenged to drink it anyway. “Oh it’s not for me? Well, we’ll see about that!” It’s basically the relatively misogynistic way for the Dr Pepper company to place half of the country in front of a giant, shiny red button that says “do not touch.”

And they don’t have to worry about the male audience because, as we’ve seen by the exhausting amount of sandwich and kitchen jokes in the past year, a good chunk of the men in Dr Pepper’s target audience don’t really care if something offends the female sector. For one particular audience – middle school boys – it’s probably more of a motivator.

So, fine. I can understand why that commercial made it to air.

What I can’t understand is why it’s still there.

The shock value is gone.

What exactly is Dr Pepper 10? What makes it different from regular Dr Pepper, and why would somebody prefer it? Those are the things an ad should address. According to Google, Dr Pepper 10 is a diet soda. Who gets the reputation for drinking diet drinks? Women do.

What Dr Pepper is going for, is that they’re trying to target a new market. They know that if a woman wants a diet version of a drink she likes, the ad isn’t going to do much. They also know that men don’t generally drink diet drinks on their own, and they’re trying to get men to drink their diet soda by not referring to it as such.

Men as the focus of an ad for a diet drink isn’t exactly a novel idea. The Pepsi Max “I’m Good!” commercial comes to mind. The difference is that the Pepsi Max commercial was funny and clever and the Dr Pepper 10 commercial has a tagline that’s “Not for Women.”

It’s time to move on. Maybe change up the tagline, maybe come up with something new, maybe just avoid airing one of them during the super bowl for crying out loud, and maybe look at your life and look at your choices.

This campaign isn’t new; the first ad aired quite a while ago. Stop it now, stop it while you can. And drink Pepsi Max; it’s a heck of a lot tastier.