Archive for the 'Sexism' Category
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
More Moronic Misogyny From Unilever
Our old reliable favorite, Axe perfumes for adolescent males, is at it again, taking heavily-researched stupidity-promotion and self-delusion to still new levels. According to the latest Advertising Age:
Axe ads have traditionally been about products that instantly turn women into lust-crazed vixens bent on coupling with Axe-wearing gents as quickly as possible. But in the first ad for the new fragrance Twist, a robot makes over the guy repeatedly during the course of a date in which the woman appears acutely interested only at the end. The ad is based on a concept co-created by consumers and ad agency Ponce (in late 2008, the agency was renamed Ponce Buenos Aires after Fernando Vega Olmos left to work on Unilever at JWT).
“Women get bored easily,” notes a version of the ad for Axe sibling Lynx in the U.K., which touts a “fragrance that changes.”
The reality, said David Cousino, global director of consumer and marketing insights at Unilever, is that all fragrances change, starting with a fresh, strong, usually citrusy top note that lasts for as long as an hour and aims to help cover the smell of alcohol-based propellants as they evaporate, progressing to a generally richer, milder mid-note and a longer-lasting and often subtler-still “dry-down” note. This is all old hat to fragrance developers and marketers, he said, but it was new and fascinating to the consumers in the development group.
“The guys linked that to the mating game and how guys are feeling that they need to constantly change and evolve to keep the girls interested,” Mr. Cousino said.
“Women get bored easily”? Really? In the 21st century, big businesses are still getting away with this?
And people wonder about the cultural impact of corporate marketing?
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
All-American Moron Alert
Advertising Age reports that the reactionary, fake-Christian group Focus on the Family has purchased a 30-second spot during the 2010 Superbowl. The ad stars the brainless mega-ass Tim Tebow, pictured at left in a rare moment when he’s not running his mouth thanking Jesus for over-seeing one of his college football games.
Ad Age describes the anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-love, anti-real-family nature of the ad:
The organization’s ad will feature college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, sharing a personal story centered on the theme of “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life,” according to a news release from Focus on the Family.
Not only do I look forward to hating whatever NFL team gets stuck with the odious peckerwood Tebow, but I commend this ad to those interested in the competing analyses of which side of the spectrum is shut out of the corporate media, and which is not, despite its fact-free, flak-providing bleats about “the liberal media” (meaning “the leftist media”).
Ad Age, of course, relays the preposterous claim that FOTF’s “Super Bowl commercial is not polarizing and does not take an ‘anti’ stance against any issue.”
Sure. And all the other ads, for each of which which CBS collects between $5,000,000 and $5,600,000 per minute (one wonders: WWJDWFMD?), are merely there to provide information, not mind-injections, to citizens.
Monday, January 26th, 2009
Why (Most) Movies Suck
The market totalitarian Boehners who call themselves “conservatives” are messing their drawers over the very idea of adding $50 million to the laughably puny $145-million annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. “Conservatives,” you see, say they think the NEA is a boondoggle.
Contrast this sense of where boondoggles come from with the excellent recent reportage of New Yorker critic Tad Friend on the workings of the corporate capitalist movie studios — where $50 million, by the way, is less than half of what gets spent there on a single movie, a.k.a. “property,” according to Friend.
As Friend reports:
“Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates,” one studio’s president of production says. “So at green-light meetings it’s a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross.
This, of course, means that:
Marketing considerations shape not only the kind of films studios make but who’s in them—gone are lavish adult dramas with no stars, like the 1982 “Gandhi.”
Even within this situation, which is well-known to industry insiders, if not the general public, there is no doubt what corporate capitalist movies are:
Marketers and filmmakers are often quietly at war. “The most common comment you hear from filmmakers after we’ve done our work is ‘This is not my movie,’ ” Terry Press, a consultant who used to run marketing at Dreamworks SKG, says. “I’d always say, ‘You’re right—this is the movie America wants to see.’ ”
Friend finds the resulting imperatives “unexpected,” but nonetheless does a great job listing them. Read the rest of this entry »
Thursday, September 13th, 2007
Sexism in Corporate Marketing
The same institutional logic that builds intentional racism into big business marketing also builds in intentional sexism. See “Racism in Corporate Marketing” posted below.
The only difference is in the roles portrayed. African-Americans almost always appear in advertising and sponsored shows as athletes, musicians, buffoons, and/or sidekicks. Women appear as mothers, wives, servants, and/or carbon-based blow-up-doll life forms.
The effects on the culture are the same: Subtle and light, yet widely dominant suppression of the chances for further progress in deflating sexist ideology.
I think there are more loopholes and exceptions to sexism than to racism within the marketing juggernaut. Nonetheless, I am convinced that further vanquishment of our legacy of racism and sexism (and also of other bio-fictitious fibs like nationalism) will not occur until we also begin to assail big business marketing and the overclass its serves.
