Advertising is an industry that is all too easy to dismiss as anti-woman. For decades now, the industry has grown while presenting women as objects to be consumed, all the while limiting opportunities for women who seek careers in the field. The television series Mad Men reinforced the unfortunate status of women in advertising, from…
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Alan Clark, owner of SABMiller – a company responsible for Grolsch and Peroni, bought Australian beer brand, Fosters in 2011. Clark would rather women be consumers of the product nowadays than co-star scantily clad in television commercials and has blamed the common advertisements that frequented television sets throughout the 1980s for their lack of women…
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As a daughter that was raised on yearly Super Bowl parties, complete with pounds of guacamole and endless mounds of wings, available in every heat level desirable, it’s no surprise that I was a little disappointed when I wasn’t at home to partake in the action this year. Many weeks have past since that weekend…
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Well, well, well, it looks like Snickers has some competition. It seems that another “empowering” advertisement, this time from the cosmetics brand Dove, has missed its mark and voyaged way off centre with its new video: Dove Patches. The new marketing campaign sees five physically and emotionally insecure women wear the ‘revolutionary’ RB-X Beauty Patch,…
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Veet’s newest ad campaign has caused a stir in a commercial that seems to imply that women will basically turn into men if they don’t wax their legs and rid themselves of body hair. Each of the commercials show a woman who has transformed into a hairy man, even though her legs were only deemed…
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Popular chocolate brand, Snickers, has recently received a great deal of criticism over its latest ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’ ad – both from feminists and rival chocolate companies alike. The one minute, 11 second video depicts a group of construction workers shouting surprisingly encouraging feminist and anti-sexist phrases to passing women below. A…
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American fast-food chain Carls Jr, obscenely nick-named ‘Slutburgers’, has made plans to bring the stores to Australia, and with it a raunchy reputation of using sexual objectification and soft-porn to sell it’s less than nutritious products. Carls Jr is responsible for initiating a new culture of advertisements, using almost pornographic commercials in attempts to appeal to a…
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CoverGirl’s latest ad campaign, #GirlsCan, is basically everything you would want, as a cosmetics brand, in order to capture the attention of your target audience. They’ve got empowering music, the colour pink, and strong statements from a few of the most famous female faces in the world, including Ellen DeGeneres, Queen Latifah, Katy Perry, P!NK…
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For those who missed it, obscure Bondi burger restaurant “Goodtime Burger” skyrocketed to infamy last month after publishing an ad featuring a woman’s outer labia as the meat in a hamburger bun. The caption read: ‘The freshest fun between the buns’, and sparked outrage from the public, with voices criticising the ad as “sexist,” “unappetising,”…
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Special K has launched a campaign to fight so-called ‘fat talk’ – comments from women harshly critiquing their own bodies. In a new advertisement titled ‘Shhhhut Down Fat Talk,’ the cereal brand filled a clothing store with placards quoting negative tweets and other online commentary. The ad shows women entering the store, reading the signs,…
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A Polish coffin company has taken the objectification of women in advertising to a new level by producing a calendar of nudes. And coffins… Lindner’s 2014 calendar is the fifth in its annual collection, featuring scantily clad women, draping themselves over luxury coffins. The family owned business claims that the calendar shows off the ‘the beauty of…
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Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for sexism, here comes Renault rolling in with their new ad for Koleos which features the tagline: ‘Beautiful meets Capable.’ The video has everyone asking; is there sexism at play here? Hell yes there is. The ad is a short snippet into the life of a…
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Department store Target is copping it for its new advertising campaign featuring the fabulous British-Chinese TV fashion guru, Gok Wan. The particular advertisement causing such criticism is a bra ad in which Wan states that if you have a bra professionally fitted (at Target), ‘your bangers will never feel more loved.’ (Bri-ish accent for effect)….
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I have to admit that sometimes the relentless one-dimensional portrayals of women in advertising and the media wear me down. I start to reach the point where I almost feel like I’m past caring; like it needs to be a very special kind of offensive for me to drum up any outrage. It’s not that…
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