Learning to Sell Sex(ism)

Advertising Students and Gender

Aileen O'Driscoll

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319942797
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319942803
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

© The Author(s) 2019

A. O'DriscollLearning to Sell Sex(ism)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94280-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Aileen O’Driscoll¹

(1)

Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland

End Abstract

On the day that I interviewed Pauline,¹ an advertising art director, who told me that her male creative director ‘hates the way men are always or quite often perceived to be the bumbling idiot in ads next to the woman …who is the smart, logical one’, the comment was significant for the fact that it mirrored a belief expressed by a number of the advertising students who participated in this study, and who likewise felt that advertising’s representation of men has become increasingly problematic. Indeed, these students referred to the trend of misandrist advertising as one of notable concern. Such a conviction, among others, clearly warranted closer scrutiny.

This book has come about as a result of two questions that germinated in my mind for a considerable time. Firstly, why does advertising seem to be central in pushing an aggressive ‘war of the sexes’ cultural narrative, intent on positioning men and women as opposites (albeit a ‘war’ constructed in ways to suggest sexual frisson as well as tension and difference between the two)? And, secondly, who makes these ads? While both questions began more as casual talking points, before tackling them through academic enquiry, they did point to an intense concern with what I saw as the advertising industry’s continued trotting-out of sexist and old-fashioned assumptions about women and men. This niggling need to find out more about the people behind the making of adverts turned into a desire to discover if there was some correlation between advertiser’s personally held attitudes and opinions about gender and the content we see on our televisions, hear on the radio, flip through in the magazines we read, and rush past on the billboards that occupy our streets.

That curiosity led to me thinking about whether the educational sphere might offer some insights into the gendered work practices and texts produced by the advertising industry. In other words, were advertising students entering the industry with certain gendered attitudes already in tow? It was apparent that if I wanted to explore this in a concerted way then a number of questions would have to be answered: How do advertising students understand gender and related issues? What are their predominant attitudes to representations of gender, gender roles, and sexism in advertising texts? What are their perceptions of working in an advertising agency, and do they believe there is room to be gender critical in designing and creating adverts? Finally, some consideration was given to the extent to which the topic of gender is currently incorporated into third-level advertising communications degree courses. These pressing questions kicked off the study that underpins this work. This book, therefore, is an attempt to shed light on these considerations and comes, I would argue, at an opportune time. In the wake of the sexual assault charges laid at the feet of Hollywood executive and film producer Harvey Weinstein, conversations about the problem and prevalence of predatory, intimidating, and indeed more seemingly benign but nevertheless sexist behaviours against women by their male colleagues and superiors has spilled over from the media and entertainment industries to politics, academia, and those who work in the services industries. Such industry-wide soul-searching must also involve scrutiny of smaller-scale domains and dynamics in order that sexism against women and girls may be better tackled. Consequently, this book explores what the typical gendered attitudes of a group of advertising students might reveal about their opinions towards the sexes and how that may be mirrored in the kind of content created by the advertising industry. In other words, although this study’s cohort is modest in terms of numbers of advertising students surveyed and interviewed, extrapolation of the findings is useful when considering whether proactive measures are needed in order to address the persistent issue of gender stereotyping and sexism in advertising.

The emphasis of this book on the future producers of media content is predicated on an acknowledgement that careful critique must continue to be carried out on how the sexes, gender roles, and gender norms are represented and perpetuated by such media texts as film, television programmes, and advertising in particular. Such feminist campaigning groups as OBJECT, among others, persist in raising awareness about stereotypical and reductive representations in the media and advertising. This attentiveness is echoed in the academic sphere with Rosalind Gill (2007) arguing that ‘[s]tarting from the proposition that representations matter, feminist analyses of the media have been animated by the desire to understand how images and cultural constructions are connected to patterns of inequality, domination and oppression’ (p. 7). The focus of present-day feminist campaigns draws heavily on second-wave feminist discourse, which in the 1970s developed an understanding of the interplay between culture, gender,² and power (Williamson 1978; Goffman 1979; Kilbourne 1979) by accounting for both substantive and symbolic challenges facing women.

Those critiquing representations of the sexes and associated gender roles have long pointed the finger at the advertising industry. Theorists have explained the emergence of advertising from a number of different perspectives. Since the Industrial Revolution ushered in a phenomenon of mass production, the manufacturing of products in large bulk needed to take place in a context where producers could be confident that demand would keep up with supply. As a result, advertising emerged as a strategy in order to allay the fears of producers. The role of the advertiser was, and is, to develop and implement strategies that predict and influence consumer behaviour. However, Lury and Warde (1997) posit the view that advertising exists more to assuage the anxieties of the producer of goods, rather than to nudge the consumer to make certain decisions. Advertisers do this through assertions that they have a unique insight into the consumer’s psyche. The ability of advertising to predict and manipulate consumer behaviour and choice is a hotly debated topic. Perhaps it is more accurate to think of the advertisers’ function as ‘a kind of modern witch doctor … to calm the worried spirits of the producers of potentially unwanted commodities’ (Lury and Warde 1997, p. 96).

Notwithstanding the contested raison d’être of advertising, the fact remains that companies producing goods and services for commercial sale do turn to advertisers to promote their products. The advertising industry achieves this through a number of different functions, broadly split between executive and creative activities. The executive roles within the advertising industry fulfil such functions as the management of client portfolios by the account handler; the strategic planners, who have responsibility for providing insight into the particular consumer markets; and the media planner, who devises strategies concerning media and marketing. The creative department includes the art director, who creates and develops the vision, the images, and the overall feel and tone of the advertising campaign; the adverts text is devised by the copywriter in conjunction with the art director, and their work is overseen by the creative director. All three roles are collectively referred to as ‘creatives’.

Following consultation with clients, the executive side of the agency delivers a ‘brief’ to the creatives, which outlines the product or products to be advertised, the objectives of the campaign, the target audience, as well as, sometimes, broader requirements about the overall message and company ethos to be communicated by the campaign. While there are many different objectives, aims, and functions that come together in the design and dissemination of an advertising campaign, and indeed often competing visions and ideas between client and advertising agency, and sometimes disagreement between executive and creative practitioners about the direction of campaigns, the role of the creative department within the advertising process represents the sphere where there is most influence and control over the choices made in how to fulfil the brief (Soar 2000). In other words, while allowing for the fact that the client is ultimately in the more powerful position of being able to reject a proposed advertising campaign as put forward by the agency, the creative retains the power of choosing certain images, ideologies, and discourses in planning and designing the campaign in the first place. For this reason, the creative function within advertising practice is here afforded dominant status in shaping advertising content. Furthermore, and more generally, although numerous factors are relevant to any analysis and study of advertising and the industry, this book, rather than focusing on how effective various strategies are in driving up sales for the clients of advertisers, is concerned with the social implications of using gendered images, narratives, and discourses as a selling strategy.

This concern is driven by recognising that such is the reach and influence of the advertising industry in contemporary society that it is positioned as one of the most controversial of media industries (Cook 2000). It is argued (James et al. 1994) that no other industry has, throughout its existence, received such criticism. Advertising is a particularly potent form of communication in multimedia, which goes beyond simply promoting and selling products. In addition to creating collective unease (Pollay 1986; Cook 2000; Lazar 2006), it is thought to manipulate already existing social anxieties (Jhally 2011). Advertising prompts all consumers, not ju...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Gendered Advertising: From Text to Industry to Classroom
• 3. We’re Just Different (But Equal): Unpacking Students’ Gendered Views
• 4. The Reverse Stereotype and the Double Standard: Expressions of Concern About Advertising’s Treatment of Men
• 5. The Catch-22 of Advertising Practice (and Other Deflections): Perceived Challenges to Creating Less Sexist Content
• 6. Conclusions and Reflections
• Back Matter