Women’s issues are mak­ing big head­lines and gen­er­at­ing huge view­er­ship num­bers. But recent fails from Wal­mart and Sub­way – even if no mal­ice was intend­ed – point to a dis­con­nect between nation­al con­ver­sa­tion and the con­ver­sa­tion brands have with cus­tomers.

Late­ly, there’s been increas­ing nation­al con­ver­sa­tion about domes­tic vio­lence, harass­ment, pay inequal­i­ty, body image, and oth­er issues relat­ed to and/or impor­tant to the so-called fair­er sex.

In Sep­tem­ber, the per­haps now infa­mous ele­va­tor video footage of Bal­ti­more Ravens run­ning back Ray Rice punch­ing his wife was released, which was fol­lowed by his indef­i­nite sus­pen­sion and a wider dis­cus­sion of domes­tic abuse, includ­ing the hash­tag #Why­IS­tayed, in which Twit­ter users shared their sto­ries.

For its part, frozen piz­za brand DiGiorno, which has 84,000 Twit­ter fol­low­ers and was per­haps one of the big brand win­ners of Super Bowl XLVIII with tweets like, “YO, THIS GAME IS LIKE A DIGIORNO PIZZA BECAUSE IT WAS DONE AFTER TWENTY MINUTES #Super­BowI #Super­S­mack #DiGiorNOY­OU­DID­NT,” learned a pow­er­ful les­son in check­ing con­text before insert­ing itself into social con­ver­sa­tions. That’s because the usu­al­ly on-point brand tweet­ed, “#Why­IS­tayed You had piz­za,” and quick­ly had to shift into apol­o­gy mode.

And DiGiorno cer­tain­ly isn’t the only brand to fail when it comes to sen­si­tive top­ics relat­ed to women’s issues even though the con­ver­sa­tion has not only con­tin­ued, but per­haps even reached a fever pitch in recent weeks.

Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle

Case in point: Even before the NFL brouha­ha, Fun­ny or Die teamed up with Mad Men’s Christi­na Hen­dricks to cre­ate Mod­ern Office, a video that says it exam­ines “which is more old-fash­ioned: her style, her typ­ing skills, or the office’s poli­cies toward women,” and, to date, it has 1.3 mil­lion views.

The Hen­dricks video was fol­lowed by the con­tro­ver­sial video from T‑shirt brand FKH8, Pot­ty Mouthed Princess­es, in which girls dressed head to toe in pink and pur­ple cursed a lot to get the brand’s mes­sage across.

“Ask­ing the ques­tion, ‘What’s more offen­sive? A lit­tle girl say­ing f*ck or the sex­ist way soci­ety treats girls and women,’ these adorably artic­u­late lit­tle ladies in sparkling tiaras turn the ‘princess in dis­tress’ stereo­type on its head and con­trast the F‑word with words and sta­tis­tics soci­ety should find shock­ing such as ‘pay inequal­i­ty’ and ‘rape,’” FCKH8 says in a press release.

What’s more, the Mash­able Glob­al Ads Chart, which is pow­ered by pro­gram­mat­ic mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy plat­form Unruly, lists Pot­ty Mouthed Princess­es as the top viral ad of Octo­ber, with more than 784,000 shares.

Then, on Octo­ber 28, anti-street-harass­ment orga­ni­za­tion Hol­laback struck viral video gold when it released 10 Hours of Walk­ing in NYC as a Woman, a video that seeks to illus­trate the extent of street harass­ment and, as of Novem­ber 4, has more than 32 mil­lion views.

It, in turn, inspired Fun­ny Or Die to cre­ate its own street harass­ment PSA, say­ing, “After watch­ing a video of a woman expe­ri­enc­ing over 100 instances of street harass­ment dur­ing a 10 hour peri­od walk­ing the streets of New York City, Fun­ny Or Die News decid­ed to con­duct an exper­i­ment to see what hap­pens to a white man walk­ing the streets of NYC.”

The result, 10 Hours of Walk­ing in NYC as a Man, has near­ly 6 mil­lion views.

These videos have also gar­nered quite a bit of press cov­er­age, extend­ing the con­ver­sa­tion even fur­ther.

And, on top of that, SNL cast mem­ber Michael Che then report­ed­ly chimed in on Face­book with his two cents about the street harass­ment video, elon­gat­ing the news cycle even fur­ther.

And the Hits Just Keep On Coming

But Che and Fun­ny or Die are mere­ly the tip of the pop­u­lar cul­ture ice­berg.

Take singer Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass”, for exam­ple. With lyrics like, “I see the mag­a­zines work­ing that Pho­to­shop / We know that shit ain’t real / Come on now, make it stop,” and “Cause every inch of you is per­fect / From the bot­tom to the top,”

Trainor’s hit song tack­les yet anoth­er one of these issues and con­tin­ues to top the charts after its debut in June. And, for its part, the music video has more than 220 mil­lion views.

And then there’s Gamer­gate, yet anoth­er head­line-grab­bing top­ic about misog­y­ny in the gam­ing indus­try.

So with all of the videos, hash­tags and head­lines float­ing around, it’s safe to say there’s a lot of atten­tion on women’s issues right now. And, at the very least, brands that don’t want to make seri­ous social mis­steps – which is per­haps to say all of them, except for those that believe there’s no such thing as bad press – could, in the­o­ry, be expect­ed to be cog­nizant of what’s going on in the media and pop cul­ture and to tai­lor their mes­sag­ing accord­ing­ly. Or to at least keep a low pro­file and not overt­ly offend women en masse.

Is This Thing On?

But are brands lis­ten­ing?

For its part, the NFL hired a female CMO, Dawn Hud­son, in part pre­sum­ably to show its female fans it val­ues their con­tin­ued par­tic­i­pa­tion and dol­lars.

Time will tell whether the NFL has for­ev­er alien­at­ed its female fan base. But, accord­ing to a report from Reuters, NFL view­er­ship num­bers through Sep­tem­ber were on the rise, indi­cat­ing the brand has poten­tial­ly weath­ered the storm.

In the mean­time, how­ev­er, there were two major brand fails for Hal­loween that illus­trate that while brands may val­ue female dol­lars, they’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly tak­ing these issues to heart until they absolute­ly have to.

Oops…We Didn’t Mean to Call You ‘Fat Girls’

The first comes from retail giant Wal­mart, who, as report­ed by women’s inter­est site Jezebel, had a sec­tion on its web­site labeled “fat girl cos­tumes.”

Once it came to Walmart’s atten­tion, it was quick­ly rela­beled “plus size,” but Wal­mart still man­aged to offend quite a few peo­ple.

Call­ing it a “sen­si­tive and impor­tant issue,” Wal­mart spokesman Ravi Jari­wala told Momen­tol­ogy that the “fat girl” label was “tak­en down very quick­ly” and the brand is “appalled that [the inci­dent] took place.”

“We know we have acci­den­tal­ly hurt a lot of people’s feel­ings and there’s noth­ing we can do to change that,” Jari­wala said. “So many of our cus­tomers are women and they deserve bet­ter. Since that incident…we have been review­ing our own process­es to do every­thing we can to pre­vent it from hap­pen­ing again.”

Accord­ing to Jari­wala, the brand sub­con­tracts work to third par­ties and it is one of those sub­con­trac­tors that changed the name of “the search result page that was served back to a par­tic­u­lar search engine.”

As a result, Jari­wala said Wal­mart spent “all day Monday…scrubbing the rest of the site.”

The brand has also tak­en steps to make sure this does not occur again in part by increas­ing the num­ber of sub­con­trac­tors that are required to vote on page title changes. Where­as sub­con­trac­tors pre­vi­ous­ly had the abil­i­ty to man­u­al­ly make changes, they must now vote on pro­posed page titles and any “no” votes will be flagged for review by Wal­mart asso­ciates.

How­ev­er, when asked if this inci­dent will impact how the brand speaks to women, Jari­wala said, “We’re hav­ing those con­ver­sa­tions right now.”

So, while not inten­tion­al, it also remains to be seen whether female con­sumers large and small will penal­ize the brand and whether this inci­dent will result in a more sen­si­tive Wal­mart more attuned to cur­rent events.

Women Have A Moral Imperative To Remain Attractive Year-Round

Anoth­er fail: Jared Fogle’s favorite quick-ser­vice sand­wich chain, Sub­way, put out an ad telling women to stay skin­ny so they’ll fit into bare­ly there, man-pleas­ing Hal­loween cos­tumes.

The video fea­tures a woman with a six-inch sub who mod­els sexy nurse, Red Rid­ing Hood, Viking, dev­il, school­teacher and foot­ball play­er cos­tumes.

The video was wide­ly panned by pub­li­ca­tions like Time, Today and AdWeek, and, per the lat­ter, it was even­tu­al­ly pulled from the brand’s YouTube page.

For its part, Jezebel weighed in with, “Luck­i­ly Sub­way is here to help ensure that you don’t scare the chil­dren with any fat rolls while you’re roam­ing the streets in a sexy nurse cos­tume.”

And AdRants, added, “But who are we to get down on a brand for hav­ing a bit of harm­less fun? Wait, what? Harm­less fun? You mean the kind of fun that sets women back 50 years and cements the fact that they’re sex objects?”

A Sub­way spokesman emailed the fol­low­ing state­ment to Momen­tol­ogy:

“We under­stand that some peo­ple may not have picked up on the intend­ed humor in our Hal­loween com­mer­cial. Our objec­tive was cer­tain­ly not to offend any­one.”

He did not respond to addi­tion­al ques­tions about impact, if any, on the brand’s efforts to speak to women.

Per­haps the Sub­way team should have watched this video from Buz­zFeed in which men try on women’s Hal­loween cos­tumes to gain a lit­tle per­spec­tive. It has near­ly 1.5 mil­lion views to date.

Don’t Be A Tone Deaf Brands

To be fair, Hal­loween cos­tumes are big busi­ness. While the Nation­al Retail Fed­er­a­tion did not specif­i­cal­ly break out fig­ures for cos­tumes that show a lot of skin, it did say in a press release that con­sumers were expect­ed to spend $1.4 bil­lion on adult cos­tumes this year, which is even more than they spend on children’s getups. The NRF also said the most pop­u­lar cos­tumes for adults were expect­ed to be “tra­di­tion­al options like witch­es, ani­mals or Bat­man char­ac­ters.”

And there was cer­tain­ly no short­age of sexy 2014 cur­rent event cos­tume options, like Ebo­la nurse and Olaf from Disney’s “Frozen”, which, reports say, was actu­al­ly sold out on the dis­trib­u­tor web­site well before Hal­loween.

But the point isn’t to pass judg­ment on cos­tumes, “sexy” or oth­er­wise, but rather to point out a dis­con­nect between nation­al con­ver­sa­tion and the con­ver­sa­tions brands have with con­sumers.

“It’s pret­ty incred­i­ble that brands could still be so myopic and insen­si­tive to cur­rent events sur­round­ing gen­der and cul­ture,” said Tes­sa Wegert, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor at dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing agency Enlight­en. “My guess is that mar­keters feel a lot of pres­sure to be fun­ny, and inad­ver­tent­ly take things too far. Social lis­ten­ing is crit­i­cal these days, but the fact that brands are still mak­ing mis­steps sug­gests they aren’t as on top of con­sumer chat­ter as they should be.”

While cre­ative lead time could be a legit issue, Wegert said brands must still keep cur­rent on news trends and the pre­dom­i­nant con­sumer out­look.

“Now more than ever brands need to be super nim­ble, not just opti­miz­ing as they go but gen­er­at­ing cre­ative in real-time,” she said. “I can’t think of how else they’re going to ensure they don’t make major, and poten­tial­ly irrev­o­ca­ble, gaffes.”

Do you have any tips for how brands can avoid fails like this? Or do a bet­ter job of social lis­ten­ing?