From a while back...
die_kluge said:
I hate the ads that show men as not liking to cook, or totally into sports, or not wanting to clean, or being domestic idiots. Bah, grow up, advertisers.
*grin*
Let me, if I may, speak for a moment in defense of marketing, advertising, and promotions. IRL I work as a manager for a graphic design studio, and I work with the folks in marketing and account services every day.
It's not that the marketing people come up with this stuff on their own. There are countless billions of dollars spent every year in market research, which often involves myriad ways to figure out exactly what people will respond positively to when it comes to making purchases.
The goal of advertising is to increase sales. Without those numbers, advertising is useless. JP Morgan is quoted as once saying "50 cents of every dollar I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I can't tell which 50 cents, so I'm going to continue spending the whole dollar anyway." It's not as though some mythical people sit in a room somewhere and come to some unilateral decision of how to sell something. No. The people that they get to sit in a room (for focus groups or poll taking or taste tests, etc.) are average folks pulled in statistically sound sampling practices who are then given several ideas and observed for their reactions.
In marketing research, you get the spectrum of responses, and historically the market shows that by aiming slightly below the average point, you get the best response.
In other words, if the advertisements you see tend toward generalizations about gender roles and such, then yes, it's because doing so is exactly what motivates people to buy the product being sold. No more, no less. We could spend a doctoral thesis or three debating the finer points of psychology and sociology that explain *why* we all tend to work from and respond to certain generalized and/or stereotyped images, but why waste space here?
Just remember... and this is the ironic part... we are *all* some brand's target demographic, and somewhere in the world there is a group of advertisers trying to figure out the best combinations of looks and hype that will get us all to pony up our hard-earned cash. Don't believe me? Consider, for a moment, where you are reading this post. On a website that is devoted to a particular brand of game. Oh yes, make no mistake, WotC and their parent Hasbro are in the business of making money, and the brand loyalty and brand involvement that we, their target demographic exhibit, makes them rather excited. They don't need to worry about maintaining the brand... we do that
for them. Instead, they can focus on how to make
more brand loyalists.
Everything is a product that someone is trying to sell. And advertising pitches to just above the lowest common denominator for the demographic they're targeting. If you want to eliminate those stereotype images in advertising, get folks to stop responding to them by buying the product.
