Hasta La Creative!

This is truly a golden age for the poo emoji, that fecund swirl who’s become the messaging embodiment of all things odious.

For proof, look no further than Betabrand’s popular “Poo Emoji Button-Up Shirt,” which just completed its crowdfunding phase and received nearly 500 percent of the preorders needed to green-light production. The goal was to sell 50 shirts to early backers, but more than 230 had committed by the time crowdfunding closed Wednesday night.

“Our initial production run will be about 800 units.,” Betabrand founder Chris Lindland tells AdFreak.

And there’s more crap to come. In addition to its existing poo emoji shoes, Betabrand is “currently seeking feedback on a poo dress for women,” Lindland says.

Now, you might be on board with poo emojis. But why is the men’s shirt short-sleeve? “The shirts are part of a creative Hawaiian shirt collection we’re developing,” Lindland said. “Our photographers thought it would be funny to shoot like a serious Banana Republic shoot.”

You can check out the results of the e-retailer’s ironic photo collection below and decide if this would be $80 well spent.

Advertising lore would have us believe that attractive women are the key to getting either gender to linger longer on your ad. But in digital, could it be that the male crotch is actually the key to click-through gold?

"Time and again, close-up shots of male crotches came up victorious, by a sizable margin," online retailer Betabrand says of the recent ad test for its Dress Pant Sweatpants. 

Betabrand tested 30 images of the pants on Facebook and Twitter, and each time, the crotch shown above rose to the occasion. (You can see some of the alternative shots of the pants on their site.)

In the Facebook promotion/ad test, the retailer says its photo of an iPad near a man's crotch yielded:
• 28,000 free site visits as a result of shares
• 64 percent more engagement (shares, likes, follows)
• 60 percent more on-site email signups
• 30 percent more clicks for the dollar
• 20 percent more purchases

Continuing the test with photo posts on Twitter, the brand says that yet again "King Crotch delivered." 

• 4 times the purchases
• 1.5 times the number of Retweets
• 78 percent more followers as a result of tweets
• 67 percent more Favorites

 "For better or worse, it's a brave new world of advertising, where clicks guide a brand's identity," says Betabrand founder Chris Lindland. "For now, ours appears to be squarely focused below the belt."

Will other brands catch on? If so, apologies in advance about your Facebook news feed.

Betabrand, an online retailer of crowdsourced clothing, just launched its spring line, and the company decided to take a different approach to marketing the new looks: Each of the models would have a Ph.D.

"When you look beyond the ranks of the professionally beautiful, photography becomes a lot more fun," Betabrand founder Chris Lindland said in a statement. "Our designers cooked up a collection of smart fashions for spring, so why not display them on the bodies of women with really big brains?" 

So they did just that. The new collection features women (yes, thin and attractive women, which some critics are sure to point out) with a Ph.D. or who are working toward a Ph.D. The retailer's spring gallery refers to them as "our ravishing roster of Ph.Ds and doctoral candidates." You can check out the full gallery here.

Lindland tells AdFreak that the brand's models are almost always his team's friends, relatives and colleagues. This year, he asked a Stanford neuropsychology graduate student if any of her friends would be interested in modeling. 

"The next thought, naturally, was to have only Ph.Ds and doctoral candidates model our spring collection," he says. "So we wrote our customers and Facebook followers, searching for Ph.Ds. Sixty women from around the world applied."

Some of the photos were shot at Betabrand's headquarters, while some models were shipped prototypes to wear in photos shot at their location.  

I asked Lindland what the response on social media has been from Betabrand's followers and customers. "Great so far. Plenty of tweets. Plenty of sales. Doctors, lawyers and MBAs have written in demanding a fashion focus of their own," Lindland said.

UPDATE: Some commenters have complained the campaign only features white models. While we can't vouch for the ethnicity of all the women involved, we've added a photo of the campaign's one African-American model, Asha, to the examples below.