(some) advertising makes you messed up and unhappy (possibly)
I’ve just read this article by Victoria Coren in The Guardian.
It suggests, somewhat disturbingly, that black women are much happier with themselves because mainstream media doesn’t represent them to quite the same extent that they do white women.
So all those pictures of Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis looking perfect are making white women feel bad about themselves, while the far lower number of perfect Tyra Banks and Halle Barry pictures means that black women don’t have the same opportunity to feel like shapeless old bags with no lives.
Shit.
If that’s true then if you’ve ever done an ad with a beautiful person in it, you’ve made someone (possibly lots of people) fundamentally unhappy.
I did an ad with a beautiful person back in ’99. She was a model. They tend to be beautiful. And there was that ad I did with Posh Spice. Is she beautiful? She was quite nice. We had her eating crisps in a bath. She was charming and chatty and ate M&S low fat crisps. I don’t remember much else about it. It was only a morning. Then we did that Walkers ad that never ran where we had to film Simon Cowell and the X-Factor people. He was also very pleasant. Really owned the room when he walked in, though. Smoked like a burnt chimney. Sharon Osbourne was fun. I once had to wait backstage with her and Ozzy while they set up a shoot for the BBC. She told all sorts of salacious stories, mainly involving Judy Finnegan and a bottle of booze. And then there was that time Ricky Gervais did a voiceover for me. Good guy. Even when the (American) client kept trying to get him to do a posher accent he was fine about it. Hang on, what were we talking about again…?
…I worked with Charlie Drake once.
i once had an interesting conversation about name dropping with Harrison Ford.
You say ‘name dropping’, I say ‘stuff with people who happen to be famous’ (which if said in public could be construed as name dropping).
‘Ricky Gervais once did a voiceover for me’.
You mean he did a voiceover for the money.
Everyone has a price.
i’ve been thinking about the Guardian campaign. the pig thing.
as much as i like bbh and ringan and the guardian, i’m afraid i have decided i don’t like this ad.
from an executional point of view, i really don’t want to see it again.
it feels like a channel four black mirror promo.
from a strategical point of view, it’s really boring.
the brief must have said, “only the guardian gives readers the whole picture”
so after i watch the ad, the words “the whole picture” come up and i’m really quite bored by them.
i blame the planners for lazy brief writing and the creatives for not pushing back on it, or finding a more interesting way of expressing it.
do i think any differently of the guardian than i did before?
nope.
should i?
i don’t really know.
i’m the target market – i didn’t really need convincing.
so who’s it actually for?
is it for sun readers?
no.
is it for people who aren’t reading the guardian but still have a brain and a point of view? if so, chances are they get their news from various different sources – some of them even smarter than the guardian.
perhaps a really brave thing to do would have been to show this in the ad.
cross referencing other media sources across the world.
or something. just not the whole fucking picture.
then there’s the actual pig thing, which is really no different to the fairytale bt broadband stories.
something more ingenious was required.
i’ll let it through to bootcamp, but no way is it going in the fucking final.
end of rant.
Anyone care about the sad white women?
I know I mushed up the issue a tad, but I’m interested in opinions on that.
I think the sad white women should man up.
Seriously, though, you’ve got to have enough self esteem to be who you are in this world. If advertisers make you feel unhappy because you are not the prettiest thing in the world, you should probably get a soul.
Ps. I am not a woman hater.
The John Lewis ad with the woman growing up depressed me as it made me think, shit, my life is NOT running according to schedule! (I’m a 26 year old white female). I find the Dove ads a bit patronising – I don’t look like a model but I also don’t look like a flabby 40 something. I like the Boots ads. Make up ads etc don’t bother me as I know they’re massively photoshopped. Would black women not feel more alienated that they’re not represented?
I sometimes think my wife is a FUWW (Fundamentally Unhappy White Woman) but I’m sure that’s down to airbrushed models (although she is obsessed with defying the ageing process). I think it’s more to do with being married to me.
Ok. Having dated a few black women I know their self-esteem has fuck all to do with the fact that they don’t see that many ads featuring black women. Victoria Coren would know this too if she didn’t have an article to write.
There’s a whole set of other factors to consider? Shall I go on?
Approximately 40,000 women have silicone breasts, mostly not to do with post-cancer reconstruction. That is unbearably sad. Not having the ability to be happy as an individual, rather than as a cookie cutter girlie is deeply depressing. Air-brushing is the work of the devil. But anyone who buys into it is an idiot. This is not what we burned our bras for in the 60s. The world seems to be going backwards. Am going to have a nap now and be grateful that I wasn’t born yesterday.
Not giving a toss about sad white women, could I point you in the direction of my latest opus* currently being filmed in Old Compton Street. “King of Soho” is a bio pic of Paul Raymond starring Steve Coogan. Get down there quick if you want to be a blight on the film crew…..
*alright. It’s not mine. Some talentless fuckwit called Michael Winterbottom. But it was my idea in the first place. “King of Hammersmith & Fulham”. Now THAT’S got a ring to it.
There is a go compare ad at the moment with the three little pigs, it’s shit but will be more effective and memorable than the guardian ad and cost far less than what’ you could fit in a, well piggy bank.
Still thinking about the Guardian ad? Yet somehow convinced it isn’t memorable?
I physically bumped into Keith Chegwin on the streets of London, and now he follows me on Twitter.
Shall we all clear a little space for ourselves to drop names in? =)
That’s kind of an odd thing for Coren to suggest, I think, certainly I think that the general consensus is that everyone is made to feel bad about themselves by media in some way or another!