media: marketing

The ad below is the first-ever British TV commercial advertising abortion services family planning options, including abortion.  It is being shown late at night and says:

If you’re late for your period, you could be pregnant. If you’re pregnant and not sure what to do, Marie Stopes International can help.

I don’t remember ever seeing such a commercial. Condoms, birth control pills, pregnancy tests, herpes medication, HPV vaccines, tampons, Viagra, and sex, sex, sex, YES. Abortion, NEVER. Salon seems to claim that it’s the first of its kind anywhere.

Have you ever seen such a thing where you live? What do you imagine are the politics around the airing of a commercial advertising abortion services?

Via Feministing.

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.

Sent along by Dmitiry T.M.

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.

Stephanie DeH., Cara McC., and our intern, Lauren McGuire, sent in this CPR certification campaign that embraces the idea that sex sells.  I initially added it to our post on using sex to sell unlikely things (e.g., organ donation and sea monkeys), but I changed my mind and decided it deserved its own discussion.

What was interesting to me about this example is the sexualization of the possibility of dying. The fact that a person might die is apparently not serious enough to make it unsexy.  It actually took me a minute to even notice the weirdness of sexualizing the risk of death.  After I noticed I thought “How crazy!”  But then I thought again: in a society that regularly sexualizes violence and murder, the sexualization of near-death is par for the course (which, of course, is why it didn’t strike me as particularly weird in the first place.

NSFW and possibly triggering, so images are after the jump:

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This ad, spotted by Stephanie DeH. in a physical therapist’s office, asks viewers to donate blood with the argument that it’s “easier” to save a life than to save the world:

Text:

Saving the world isn’t easy. Saving a life is.
Just one pint of blood can save up to three lives.

The ad commits two fallacies.

First, it compares saving the whole world (or maybe every tree in the world) with saving just “a” life.  Saving a life may, indeed, be easier than saving the whole world, but it’s not a fair comparison.  Saving the whole world is hard, but about as hard as saving every life on it.

Second, it suggests that we have to choose.  “You could try to save the world,” the ad says, “but it’s pretty hopeless.  It’s much easier to save a life.  So put down that tree and donate blood.”  Giving blood, then, is placed in competition with environmental activism as if (or because) volunteerism is a zero sum game.

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.

Fluid hair salon released this ad to let people know that it is donating all clipped hair to the oil recovery efforts in the Gulf:

The ad is a perfect example of the way in which entirely-unrelated messages get inexplicably translated into half-naked women looking uncomfortable.  Why not advertise donations to oil recovery with clean beaches, or dirty beaches, or oil booms, or rinsed off birds, or smiling shrimpers, or actual hair-based oil spill mats?  Why in heaven’s name slather a perfectly clean woman in goop that looks like oil and make her crawl in a marsh?

Because half-naked women who are dirty, disgusting, and uncomfortable are high-fashion.  Because we love to see women on their knees in the mud.  To a great extent, elite fashion imagery involves putting women in gross situations and pretending that it’s cool.  These images assault their bodies and their dignity.  So how else would an elite salon advertise its good-doing?  Female punishment is the language of fashion. Fluid just speaks it fluently.

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.

The image above, of a bird rescued from the gulf and cleaned of oil, may ease the ache in our hearts, but research suggests that euthanizing the birds would be more humane.

Environmental biologist and expert on oil clean-up, Silvia Gaus, explained that:

Catching and cleaning oil-soaked birds oftentimes leads to fatal amounts of stress for the animals… Furthermore, forcing the birds to ingest coal solutions — or Pepto Bismol, as animal-rescue workers are doing along the Gulf Coast — in an attempt to prevent the poisonous effects of the oil is ineffective… The birds will eventually perish anyway from kidney and liver damage (paraphrased at Speigel).

Further, birds who are relocated are often so disoriented that they die anyway, not able to re-establish survival routines in their new environment.

Gaus claims that 99% of the rescued and cleaned birds will die, usually within about seven days, and it will be a more painful death that takes longer than if they’d just been left alone.  As a consequence, many recommend quick and painless euthanization.  A National Geographic article complicates the story, reporting that survival rates depend on characteristics of the spill, but still reports that scientists largely have little hope that many birds rescued from the Gulf will survive.  A better strategy for saving birds, they say, is trying to keep them out of the oil in the first place.

If cleaning birds is unlikely to save them, and euthanizing them ultimately more humane, why are we cleaning birds?

The obvious answer is that it is good for BP’s public relations.  We feel better when we see the shiny oil-free feathers; those images make us feel like there is hope for the animals caught in the spill.  It makes it look as if BP is really doing something good.  In this case, why would BP care if the de-oiling worked?  They benefit whether the birds die (a slower, more painful) death or not.  It costs about $700 to clean an oiled pelican, but that may be money well spent.

There may be an even more nefarious reason.  There are fines and penalties for killing wildlife that can be levied against corporations.  The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, for example, specifies that corporations can be fined up to $500,000 if responsible for the death of a brown pelican.  Perhaps if the bird dies after release, without direct evidence that its death was caused by oil ingestion (without an expensive autopsy), then BP will not be vulnerable to those fines.  Further, the total number of dead birds attributed to their spill be lower; those numbers, instead, will be in the column marked “saved.”

UPDATE: Jay Holcomb at the International Bird Rescue Research Center disagrees with Gaus and other pessimistic scientists.  (Thanks to Paul for the link.)  It may also be that techniques for cleaning the birds have improved over time.  So the 1% number is probably wrong, or at least needs to be qualified.  Still, I think BP’s interests still apply, but it’s overstating it to say that de-oiling is bad for birds.  Thanks to everyone in the comments who added contrasting information!

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.

Google searches are (as far as I know) purely a function of their algorithm.*  A company, for example, is not supposed to be able to pay Google to increase its rank in the results.  Google does, however, sell something on its search results page.  If a company buys a search term, when a person searches for that term, Google will place a “sponsored link” at the top of its results page that is discreetly identified as advertising.  See the upper right corner of the very gently shaded link that appears at the top of search results for the word “dell.”  This is advertising purchased by Dell computers:

Keith Marsalek at nola.com alerted me to the fact that British Petroleum (BP) has bought a bunch of search terms and phrases such that, when one searches for information about the oil spill, the first thing that comes up is BP’s public relations website (selection below).  They are hoping that internet users, whether they recognize that BP has bought the top slot or not, will read their version of events and, perhaps, only their version of events.

Read nola.com’s oil spill page instead.

UPDATE: To clarify, I’m not suggesting that this is surprising or that BP is uniquely evil in doing this.  I’m simply pointing out that money buys the power to shape the distribution of information.  Many of you have commented that “sponsored links” are ads and just skip right over them.  But others might not.  The link and the shading is very subtle.  Even if a person sees the phrase “sponsored link,” they might interpret it to mean that Google thinks it’s a good link, one they sponsored.  Not everyone is a sophisticated consumer of the internet.  And, even if they know it’s an ad, not everyone is as suspicious of ads, nor of companies, as some.  So I think buying the ad will, in fact, make it so that more people will be exposed to BP’s version than otherwise.  And that’s all I was trying to say.  It’s just a simple example of the relationship between power and knowledge.

* I know there is plenty of controversy over there algorithm as well.  Feel free to discuss that in the comments.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

One example of the pervasive sexualization of beer is the ubiquitous personification of “blond” ales as blond women.  Tom Megginson at Change Marketing made this observation and collected a number of examples of this particular example of the gendering and sexualizing of food:

See more at Megginson’s post.  See also our other posts on gender and beer here, here, and here.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.