Advertising and America
I was walking through the mall this weekend and came upon some ads (by Dove? or something... anyway, it doesn't matter,) which featured supposedly "normal" women (tagline: "tested on real curves"). My first thought (out loud,) was "what is that? Are they selling products for obese women?" The whole thing just strikes me as completely hilarious because traditional wisdom in marketing is to use beautiful people to sell products to ugly people.
The reasoning behind this is that us ugly folk will see those beautiful people and somehow, grasping at the few remaining straws in our shallow, miserable lives, make the huge jump in conclusion to associating the pretty person's beauty and obvious great life (well, look at them, you never see them UNhappy, do you??) with the use of whichever product they happen to be peddling this week. This would sound ridiculous if not reinforced every day with billions of dollars spent by the average, ugly American, who ironically enough is more or less directly paying for the salary and extravagant lifestyles of those beautiful people on the billboards. Money may not buy happiness, but it sure can pay for it.
So that tirade aside, the reason why I find this ad campaign so hilarious is that the conventional marketing as I've described above is all about "use this, drink that, to make your life better, like these people in the advertisement." What's being said now by the Dove ads is "buy this because normal, unattractive people like you use it. Not that hand cream can actually be engineered to work better for ugly people, but hey, look, we're a company that cares and understands." And I believe this to be a reflection of our society at large when corporations actually decide that the overweight, under-tall majority across America would actually look at the smiling but still overweight, under-tall "models" in this advertising campaign and think "hey, that woman has my rolls of fat too! Though my self image makes me miserable, I don't actually want to do any work to change that. But that woman in the ad looks exactly like me, except she looks happy... probably not because of that stupid hand cream she's selling but what the hell, as if I've got any better ideas at this point. Anything to avoid facing the real issues."
The sad thing is I've exaggerated a bit on the obesity of the women in the advertisements. They're definately "big boned" but they're also not quite as bad as the "average" women you'll see walking around. People who are sometimes in clothes so many sizes too small for them that their body is actually pouring out of any opening it can find because the fabric cries out constantly to be relieved of its torment and have its existance extinguished. At the end of the day, this advertising campaign isn't about truth or empathy, it's just giving people lower standards to aim for.
Welcome to America, leave your enthusiasm and passion at the door, here's your complimentary glass of apathy and deflection, on the rocks.
The reasoning behind this is that us ugly folk will see those beautiful people and somehow, grasping at the few remaining straws in our shallow, miserable lives, make the huge jump in conclusion to associating the pretty person's beauty and obvious great life (well, look at them, you never see them UNhappy, do you??) with the use of whichever product they happen to be peddling this week. This would sound ridiculous if not reinforced every day with billions of dollars spent by the average, ugly American, who ironically enough is more or less directly paying for the salary and extravagant lifestyles of those beautiful people on the billboards. Money may not buy happiness, but it sure can pay for it.
So that tirade aside, the reason why I find this ad campaign so hilarious is that the conventional marketing as I've described above is all about "use this, drink that, to make your life better, like these people in the advertisement." What's being said now by the Dove ads is "buy this because normal, unattractive people like you use it. Not that hand cream can actually be engineered to work better for ugly people, but hey, look, we're a company that cares and understands." And I believe this to be a reflection of our society at large when corporations actually decide that the overweight, under-tall majority across America would actually look at the smiling but still overweight, under-tall "models" in this advertising campaign and think "hey, that woman has my rolls of fat too! Though my self image makes me miserable, I don't actually want to do any work to change that. But that woman in the ad looks exactly like me, except she looks happy... probably not because of that stupid hand cream she's selling but what the hell, as if I've got any better ideas at this point. Anything to avoid facing the real issues."
The sad thing is I've exaggerated a bit on the obesity of the women in the advertisements. They're definately "big boned" but they're also not quite as bad as the "average" women you'll see walking around. People who are sometimes in clothes so many sizes too small for them that their body is actually pouring out of any opening it can find because the fabric cries out constantly to be relieved of its torment and have its existance extinguished. At the end of the day, this advertising campaign isn't about truth or empathy, it's just giving people lower standards to aim for.
Welcome to America, leave your enthusiasm and passion at the door, here's your complimentary glass of apathy and deflection, on the rocks.
posted at
7:30 AM
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