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Anorak News | Women Have Been Ad

Women Have Been Ad

by | 30th, June 2006

"ADVERTISING tries to reflect the culture," says Linda Kaplan, president and chief executive of the New York-based Kaplan/Thaler Group. "It’s a mini-hologram of what’s going on."

And what is going on is that men are turning into losers. The Times has seen a report in the advertising newssheet Campaign. Therein the lament is that men are being portrayed on adverts as “castrated dweebs”.

And this is just what men are. Really. Alistair Green, of advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb), says men are as they appear on adverts for cleaning products and telephones.

“Ten years ago advertising was all about aspiration, and being male and strong,” says he. “What has happened over time is that consumers are demanding more relevance to them and something to latch on to.”

Did you hear that? We the consumers are “demanding” change. This might come as something of a surprise to the millions of men who flip change the channel TV whenever adverts come on, or else dash to make a cup of restorative peppermint tea or take a leak (sitting down, naturally).

The Times seems to ignore the truth that apart from Top Gear and the football (BBC not ITV, obviously), television is made entirely and exclusively for women. Only right, then, that the women get the adverts as well.

But the Times says adverts are “wounding”, especially that one for BT where a sad sack stepfather is “constantly shown up as being nice-but-dim”. And there are the ads where James Nesbitt advertises a telephone directory and gets in all manner of empty-headed scrapes.

But men need not fret. All these adverts do is enforce the notion that woman are more capable than men. So while she fixes the phone and cleans the kitchen, the idiot man can keep his senses dulled by drinking premium strength lager in the pub with his idiot mates…



Posted: 30th, June 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink