media: marketing

I recently watched a reading of a play, New Jerusalem, with a cast of five men and two women.  One woman was a love interest, the other was an emotional, screechy brat.  By the end of the play I was so tired of the stereotype, I just wanted the play to end.

Thanks to Kristin, Christine, Amanda, Dolores R., Dmitriy T.M., and Nathan Meltz (whose awesome artwork we’ve previously featured), I am now aware that, coincidentally, this is the week that the California Milk Processor Board decided to roll out its new ad campaign. The campaign suggests that milk can save men from their cyclically bitchy girlfriends and wives.  Milk, the claim is, helps alleviate the symptoms of PMS (but see this take down).  And gawd knows there is nothing more annoying than an emotional, screechy, bitchy brat of a woman.  Their website, Everything I Do is Wrong, asks “Are you a man living with PMS?”   It links likelihood of PMS with the availability of chocolate, silver, and gold:

Tracks the “Global PMS Level”:

It suggests that women irrationally punish men for not knowing answers to trivial questions:

And purports to show men how to enhance their apologies with cheesy imagery and self-flagellation:

It’s overall a nasty soup of derogatory ideas about women and how unbelievably annoying they are to live with.  Though, as Christine wrote, it’s also…

…sexist in the way that they stereotype men as ineffective communicators, who are terrified of emotional women and the “feminine mystique” of menstruation because they (obviously) lack the faculties with which to properly negotiate any disagreements they might have with the women in their lives.

Here are some of the more delightful print ads:

The stereotype is ubiquitous. You can also find it at The Daily Cramp, a website sent in by Janine P. that says it will track your woman’s menstrual cycle and let you know when you can expect her to act crazy:

There’s also an app with the same gimmick.

And it’s been around for a long time.  This vintage ad for Midol, sent in by Jillian Y. and Lexi A.-L., tells women to medicate themselves on behalf of their “guy,” so they can be “good to be around, any day of the month”:

The problem with this stereotype is that it encourages people to see women as periodically irrational and also more generally dismiss-able.  It allows us to conflate screechiness and bitchiness with being female.

The milk board’s commentary on the negative response has been, essentially, “Aw come on, it’s all in good fun! Can’t you take a joke!” I get, milk board, that this is humorous. I totally get that. It’s also an offensive stereotype. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

See also: menstruation masculinizes women, a princess with pms who threatens to drown the land with her tears, delegitimating Hillary Clinton with pms-jokes, and our previous post on gender and the rest of the California Milk Processing Board’s website.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Quite some time ago, Laura McD. sent us a link to an NPR story about a new ad campaign for baby carrots (which, if you didn’t know, aren’t actually immature carrots; they’re just regular carrots peeled and cut into small pieces). In an effort to appeal to teens, these ads openly satirize marketing tropes used to sell lots of snacks, especially the effort to market junk food as totally extreme! The website self-consciously makes the link to junk food, winking at the audience about the absurdity of EXTREEEEEME!!!!! marketing, yet hoping that rebranding carrots as similar to junk food, and using the marketing tactics they’re laughing at, actually increases sales. So, for instance, they have new packaging that looks like bags of chips:

The ads serve as a great primer on extreme food marketing cliches, complete with associations with violence (and stupidity), the sexualization of women, and the constant reminder via voiceovers and pounding music that this food is freakin’ extreme, ok?!?!

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This one parodies ads that sexualize both women and food and present eating as an indulgence for women:

The ad campaign presents all this with a tongue-in-cheek tone of “isn’t this ridiculous?” But they’re also genuinely trying to rebrand a food product to increase sales, and clearly see the way to do that as downplaying any claims about health and instead using — if mockingly — the same marketing messages advertisers use to sell soda, chips, energy drinks, and other foods aimed at teens (particularly, though not only, teen boys).

As such, they provide a great summary of these marketing techniques and the jesting “Ha ha! We get it! We’re not like the other marketers who try to sell stuff to you! We know this is silly! (Please buy our product, though)” ironic marketing technique.

And now, I highly recommend you go watch the satire of energy drink commercials Lisa posted way back in 2007. It never gets old.

In the 1940s and ’50s dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a synthetic pesticide better known as DDT, was used to kill bugs that spread malaria and typhus in several parts of the world.  DDT was argued to be toxic to humans and the environment in the famous environmental opus, Silent Spring.  It was banned by the U.S. government in 1972.

Before all that, though, it was sprayed in American neighborhoods to suppress insect populations. The new movie Tree of Life has a great scene re-enacting the way that children would frolick in the spray as the DDT trucks went by. Here are two screen shots from the trailer:

Searching around, I also found some vintage footage (the person who uploaded the clip doesn’t specify the documentary):

The scene reminded me of an old post we’d written, below, featuring advertisements for the pesticide, one with the ironic slogan “DDT is good for Me-e-e!”

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DDT was a pesticide marketed to housewives (and many others). We later discovered it to be an environmental toxin. Below are three of the advertisements (via Mindfully and KnowDrama and noticed thanks to John L.):

DDT-laced wallpaper, from Copyranter:

(text for this final ad after the jump)

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Over the past few months, a number of readers have sent in examples of college-related advertising with a distinctly sexual theme.  There’s something interesting here. College pursuit, preparation, and achievement are being conflated with sexual prowess (the size of one’s dick, no less).  I suppose it was never was really about smarts.  Still, the overt conflation of (masculine) sexual superiority with academic achievement seems new to me. Am I wrong?

Scott M. and Ed A-N. sent in which penis size is used as a proxy for preparedness for the LSAT:

Stephanie A. sent in this ad for MyEdu, a college management site (whatever that is) that makes an obvious reference to Viagra (the little blue pill that makes for not-so-little erections):

Last but not least, Becky E. and Monica Y. sent in this facebook ad encouraging women to apply to a school loan by suggesting that very-sexy-ladies do the same:

See also our post: using sex to sell the most unlikely things (like organ donation!).

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

“Hey! Come on! Eating meat is without any ethical ramifications! See, Mr. Greenjeans? The animals aren’t complaining! So what’s your problem?”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

While some bodies are socially-defined as For Display, others are defined as embarrassing or disgusting.  Indigo and Artemis sent in a great example of these distinctions being reinforced. This series of billboards appeared in The Netherlands with the tagline “The Sooner You Advertise Here, the Better”:

The billboard humorously advertises the billboards availability for advertising, a clever version of “Your Ad Here.”  It does so, of course, by suggesting that the model’s body is so repulsive that the threat of simply seeing it should be enough to make us reach for our wallets.  While cultural beliefs about who is and isn’t attractive are often framed as biological or evolutionary, it can’t be denied that, at least in this case, we are receiving a strong social message as well.

Via Copyranter and The Daily Dish.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Sometimes public relations efforts are in such extraordinarily poor taste that it’s difficult to tell whether they’re real or a spoof.

In the 1950s, as the evidence on smoking was becoming undeniable, someone suggested that the cigarette companies were about to launch a new ad campaign: “Cancer is good for you.”

It was a joke, of course. But how about “A really bad recession is good for your marriage”? No joke. The National Marriage Project has released a report with a section claiming that the current economic crises has produced “two silver linings” for marriages. (Philip Cohen at Family Inequality eviscerates this report with the level of snark that it deserves.)  A bad recession is good for crime too, or so says the title of James Q. Wilson’s article in last Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, “Hard Times, Fewer Crimes.”*

And now welcome Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, which spends millions each year lobbying against clean-air legislation.  Last month, Peabody was the object of Coal Cares, a clever spoof Website.

(click to enlarge; source: Wired)

It was Peabody’s press release in response that makes them the clear winner of the Cancer-Is-Good-For-You competition.

The United Nations has linked life expectancy, educational attainment and income with per-capita electricity use, and the World Resources Institute found that for every tenfold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer.

The spurious logic — the implied fallacy of composition and the attempt to fob off correlation as cause — is so obvious that it could easily be part of the Coal Cares spoof.  But no, it was for real, at least while it lasted.  Unfortunately, Peabody removed the document before we could award them the CIGFY trophy .

What the UN data actually show is not surprising: Richer countries produce more electricity. They also have better health, education, and income. The message Peabody wants us to get takes the global and misapplies it locally, and it reverses cause and effect: If you want to be long-lived, educated, and rich, live near a coal-driven power plant.  Cancer, asthma, and heart disease are all good for you.

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*I don’t know if Wilson also wrote that title. Unlike the post-hoc logic suggested by the title, Wilson does not argue that the recession caused the decrease. But he does imply that the recession did not exert any upward force on crime.

The U.S. is not a very race-literate society.  We aren’t taught much about the history of race relations or racial inequality in school and almost nothing about how to think about race or how to talk to one another about these theoretically and emotionally challenging issues.  Many Americans, then, don’t have a very sophisticated understanding of race dynamics, even as most of them want racial equality and would be horrified to be called “racist.”

In teaching Race and Ethnicity, then, I notice that some of the more naive students will cling to color-blindness.  “Race doesn’t matter,” they say, “I don’t even see color.”   Being colorblind seems like the right thing to be when you’ve grown up being told that (1) all races are or should be equal and (2) you should never judge a book by its cover.  It is the logical outcome of the messages we give many young people about race.

But, of course, color blindness fails because race, despite being a social invention, still matters in our society.  Enter the ongoing scandal about the Cadbury candy bar ad featuring Naomi Campbell, sent in by Dolores R.,  Jack M., and Terri.  The ad compares the Dairy Milk Bliss Bar to Campbell.  It reads: “Move over Naomi, there’s a new Diva in town.”

The ad has been called racist because it compares Campbell to a chocolate bar; chocolate is a term sometimes used to describe black people’s skin color or overall sexual “deliciousness.”  The ad, then, is argued to be foregrounding skin color and even playing on stereotypes of black women’s sexuality.

So what happened here?  One the one hand, I see the critics’ point.  On the other, I can also imagine the advertising people behind this ad thinking that they want to link the candy bar with the idea of a diva (rich, indulgent, etc.), and choosing Campbell because she is a notorious diva, not because she’s a black, female supermodel.  They could argue that they were being colorblind and that race was not at all a consideration in designing this ad.

The problem is that being colorblind in a society where race still colors our perceptions simply doesn’t work.  The truth is that race may not have been a consideration in designing the Cadbury ad, but it should have been.  Not because it’s fun or functional to play with race stereotypes, but because racial meaning is something that must be managed, whether you like it or not.  This is where Cadbury failed.

In my classes, I ask my earnestly-anti-racist students to replace color-blindness with color-consciousness.  We need to be thoughtful and smart about race, racial meaning, and racial inequality.  Racism is bad, but color-blindess is a just form of denial; being conscious about color — seeing it for what it is and isn’t, both really and socially — is a much better way to bring about a just society.

Cadbury, for what it’s worth, has apologized.

See also the Oreo Barbie, the Black Lil’ Monkey Doll, the Obama Sock Monkey, Disparate Pricing for Black and White Dolls, and Accidentally Illustrating Evil with Skin Color.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.