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Category: Advertising

Targetmania

You know, things can get hectic over the holidays. There’s a lot to do, people are out of town, there are holiday parties to go to. You get stomach flu, you throw your back out, and your father starts calling you and talking about how his second marriage is in trouble and your twelve-year-old sister is anxiously cleaning everything in the house. (Oh wait, that last sentence is just me… uh, never mind.)

But there’s still no excuse for this grave oversight: in violation of our Official Blog Charter, we somehow forgot to post several of Sarah Haskins’ “Target: Women” videos, all about the lessons we women can learn from advertising. And movies too! Movies about vampires!

I’m sorry, this will never happen again. More videos after the jump.

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Most Disturbing Ad of the Year

Sweet Jesus. (trigger warning for that link). Thanks, Duncan Quinn, for advertising your suits with an image of a man who appears to have strangled an underwear-clad woman on the hood of a car. Gotta love it when images of dead or drugged women are sexy enough to sell men’s clothes.

Image below the fold.

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Gasp! Kids’ toys are… gendered?

We frequently take on cases of blatantly sexist advertising around here. This stuff tends to show up online from all over the world — well, from everywhere except perhaps Sweden, because in Sweden they have the Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK). The ERK recently accused Irish airline Ryanair of sexism after they rolled out an ad-campaign featuring a Britney-Spears-style schoolgirl. A campaign which didn’t cause anyone to bat an eyelash in Ireland or the UK because what, girl-flesh being used to sell something, whoa stop the presses yawn.

Of course, they’re right that relying on traditional “sex sells” tactics is sexist, since it almost always involves putting women who meet conventional beauty standards on display to attract the male gaze. It’s just that most of us are so thoroughly inured to this tactic that our mouths would seize up from saying “sexist” too much if we tried to point out problems in advertising. It’s refreshing, but kind of surprising as well.

The ERK’s latest target is Lego, the beloved Danish company that makes billions of little interlocking plastic bricks (and my former employers, I should mention). Lego has always liked to think of itself as a fairly enlightened and progressive company, but now the ERK has accused them of sexism as well — could this cause a flare-up in the age-old Svensk-Dansk rivalry? Riots on the Oresund Bridge? Probably not. I just find inter-Scandinavian enmity amusing.

Sweden’s Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK), has lambasted Lego for a recent catalogue that features the photos of the kids in their colour-coded rooms.

The girl’s picture is captioned “Everything a princess could wish for…” and features a pony, a princess and a castle. On another page, a boy is pictured playing with a fire station, fire trucks, a police station, and an airplane with the caption “Tons of blocks for slightly older boys.”

ERK has expressed concern that this type of portrayal promotes a stereotype that is degrading to boys and girls.

However, Lego has defended the catalogue, pointing out that other photos in the catalogue show boys and girls playing together.

I am shocked…. SHOCKED! — that any toy company in this day and age would depict a little girl as a princess playing with a pony in the midst of a whole lot of pink, and a boy playing with trucks and airplanes. It’s as if they think society has some kind of gender-stereotyped idea that boys and girls play with different toys! No, seriously: I’m fairly sure this comes as a surprise to nobody, not even ERK. The Swedes are correct that it’s a classic case of gender stereotyping in action, but the issue of how “boys’ play” is segregated from “girls’ play” runs a lot deeper than the thoroughly predictable mise-en-scène of this winter’s Lego catalog.

Let me tell you a little story about toy design. Once upon a time in the Kingdom of Denmark…

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But Will It Turn Me On?

The inimitable Sarah Haskins on women and car advertising: [apparently I can’t embed it, so click here]

I’ve only had a hand in buying one car and thankfully the salesman didn’t latch on to the stereotypical trope of showing me the vanity mirrors and built-in car seats. No, he waited until after the papers were signed, stared at my boobs, and asked me out to dinner. When I refused his invitation, he sort of threw the keys at me. Has anyone else been so lucky?

Well Maybe Your Identity Wouldn’t Have Gotten Stolen if You Weren’t So Fat

This photograph of an ad in a Netherlands train station was snapped by a Shapely Prose reader. It’s an ad for identity theft prevention — in short, the woman in the photograph “loses her head” over seeing a bag of candy, and her distraction allows the man behind her at the ATM to see her personal information and presumably her PIN number.  Because she’s fat.  And fat people, they just love the candy!  Get it.  GET IT????

Kate  Harding does a much better job than I could of tearing this bullshit to threads:

This goes the basic “Fatties are obsessed with food” theme one better, adding the message that fatties are infantile (which is a fairly common theme, too, come to think of it). See, all you have to do is dangle a gross-looking bag of candy in front of a fat woman, and she’ll completely forget she’s an adult performing banking functions! (Hey, maybe that explains the correlation between fat and poverty.) Since we all know fatties have no impulse control, adore cheap junk food, and can’t take responsibility for themselves — just like small children! — it makes all the sense in the world!

And then we have the decapitation. Now, I’m assuming this is part of a series of ads in which other stereotypes also “lose their heads” over seeing something people like them ostensibly enjoy. (I’d bet a whole lot of money there’s one of a young dude losing his head over a hot, barely dressed woman.) So I don’t think they just thought it would be hilarious to cut a fat woman’s head off — though I’m kind of disturbed that they thought the whole “losing your head” premise, expressed this way, was funny at all. But still, for all its cartoonishness, this is a picture of a woman’s goddamned head separated from her body; it’s a violent image. And we’re supposed to laugh at this violent image, because, dude, IT’S SO TRUE! FAT WOMEN CAN’T CONTROL THEMSELVES AROUND CANDY! And also, of course, because fat people are intrinsically funny. Did you see her double chin? SITTING ON THE GROUND? Har har!

I for one am really fucking tired of seeing women (and people of all genders, but women get it the worst) devalued based on their weight, and fat being used as the butt of a joke — particularly in ways that portray overweight people as stupid, childish, inherently unhealthy and obsessed with food.  It’s not funny, it’s demeaning and it’s bullshit.

Oh, and by the way, when those completely off-topic and ill-informed, “but it’s unheeeaaalllthy to be fat!!!  Why are you promoting unheeeaaalllthy behavior???” whiners inevitably show up, their comments are going to get deleted. Deal with it.

h/t Sociological Images

Message to the Guys: Donating Your Organs is Almost Like Sex

This ad promoting organ donation appeared in a Belgian men’s magazine.

The message at the bottom reads: Becoming a donor is probably your only chance to get inside her.

Nice way to objectify women to get across your “altruistic” message, suggest that women are only good for “getting inside of,” imply that women who don’t fit the above ideal of (poorly photoshopped) beauty aren’t quite as deserving of life, and portray men as so shallow that this is the only way to get them to do a good thing, all at the same time. It’s really quite impressive.

And yet, while I really do want to be pissed at this level of objectification, condescension and sexism, and on some level I am, I’m ultimately just incredibly bemused. I mean, who the hell thought this was a good idea?

Also, let’s just consider the menz for a minute, can we? Think about it. You’re some poor guy who donates your organs for the purpose of showing the world how very macho and heterosexual you are, and then you die and your organs go to — oh noes — another man! That would, like, make you totally gay, dude!

Or, um . . . something. I don’t know, I find homophobia almost as confusing as heterosexuality so insecure and compulsory that it requires comparing organ donation with a sex act.

cross-posted at The Curvature

A Response From Pepsi

Today, a Pepsi-Cola Company representative posted this comment on Feministe as a response to my post about the “lifeguard ad”:

Official Response from Pepsi-Cola Company:

Pepsi-Cola Company wants to assure you that there’s absolutely no Pepsi advertisement in circulation that even remotely resembles the creative in question. After investigating this matter further, we learned that an advertising agency developed this print ad on “speculation” and it inadvertently made its way to the internet.

Please know that we would never use this type of imagery to sell our products. We are not using this image now, nor do we have any plans to use it in the future.

We’re sincerely sorry that this has upset you and we’re grateful to have had the opportunity to set the record straight. If anyone following this topic would like to discuss this issue further, free to contact me at the email address listed below.

Bart Casabona
bart.casabona@pepsi.com
Pepsi-Cola Company

I followed up with Bart to verify that this is in fact an official statement.  In his response to my email, Bart also expressed his respect and understanding for our offense at the ad and assured me that Pepsi would never choose to market their brand in this manner.

I for one certainly appreciate that Pepsi took the time to look into this, and that their response not only denied but also denounced this advertisement.  I think it’s very important for them to do so when these ads have been gaining traction in advertising circles (where I myself looked in attempt to validate them) as legitimate.  The company may not have created the ad, but their branding is still on it; for that reason they needed come out against the values perpetuated in the image.  And I very much hope that Pepsi will not be using the advertising agency that created this ad in the future.

As for the ad itself . . . I think that this whole thing has been a rather interesting if not particularly surprising experiment in rape apologism.  I spent the weekend wading through, deleting and occassionally responding to large volumes of troll comments on two different blogs.  In those comments, I was called everything under the sun and the outrage that many of us felt upon seeing this ad was harshly mocked.  The complaint from every single one of these people was not that the ad was illegitimate, but that there was nothing wrong with it.  That response coupled with the fact that advertising promoting non-consensual sexual behavior is indeed very real says a lot about what I orginally declared the issue to be — rape culture. The ad is fake; rape culture is not.  While fully acknowledging and regretting the error here, I think it’s important to remember that.

Rape Culture In Unexpected Places: New Pepsi Ad

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Pepsi has responded by denying and denouncing the ad. Please see this post.

Whoa.

Other ads in the series show a monkey trading a Pepsi for the keys to a truck carrying bananas, and a young male trading a Pepsi for an astronaut’s space suit.

This ad is hugely offensive on its very face, but when compared to the other ads I think it provides an even clearer picture of what Pepsi thinks of its female consumers and women in general. This is in absolutely no way “cute” because it’s a pubescent boy who is going to assault the woman, nor is it mitigated by the assumption that he won’t do anything other than kiss her. It desperately bears noting that the woman is not only unconscious, but also in need of immediate medical attention — and in spite of the fact that if you could quite literally die in such a situation without proper care, her hotness and “availability” are still the most pressing concerns. Oh, and like a bunch of bananas, her bodily rights and very life are worth a can of soda.

HA. Hilarious, right?

Contact Pepsi here. And while I don’t drink Pepsi itself, I can tell you that I’m off Pepsi’s Mountain Dew for some time now.

h/t SAFER

cross-posted at The Curvature