“Succumb to the crumb…”
Tag Archives: advertising
advertisement for virol and milk, 1927
insight into patriarchy…
… gained from storyboarding an endless stream of jock lager ads:
Where men are a caricature of manliness, their sexuality depends on them always being The Ones Who Know, who are worldly and can sum up reality in short, pithy bro-repartee (bropartee). To achieve this, they need to simplify reality into easy-to-read contrasts, with rules in big type, so they don’t have to suffer the shrivelling-dick humiliation of being faced with complexity.
russian tampon commercial
Straight to the bloody point!
on mawkish music in ads
“This is one of those heartwrenching adverts, about funerals or tampons.”
— My mom to me as we’re clearing up after supper and the plaintive strains of a piano waft through from the TV.
lipstiffie
Facebook status update, this evening:
Storyboarding is strangely interesting when it gives a view into how different nation-states construct and respond to sales stereotypes. I’m doing a lipstick ad for actual French people from Paris right now, and it is noticeably stripped of that subtext one inevitably finds in American or South African ads that says, “Don’t worry, she’s not dangerous and what she really wants is to be your submissive little wifey.” This ad would freeze the testicles off a Sarf-Effriken jock, even though all it’s about is glamour.
It’s odd, because it is all about women achieving an aesthetic perfection so intense they are geisha-like objects of contemplation, yet the glamour is also tangibly an end in itself which doesn’t necessarily include men. It’s not like we don’t already know this, but it brought to my attention that South African culture which considers itself sophisticated is not only colonial but downright rural. Sexuality is confined to breeding, like farmyard-style.
Comments:
Lynne: Sounds like fun for a change! X are you gonna buy the lipstick? X
Lizza: Being briefed for a storyboard doesn’t necessarily go as far as anyone telling me what the product is! This time I needed to be told what it looked like, but I didn’t get the brand. Probably a load of bollocks. For all I know this could be the French version of Sarie magazine – I really wouldn’t be able to spot the difference.
danni diana on bogus muthi (and ad agencies)
A year or so ago, some colleagues of mine did a campaign for a film called Night Drive, which was a slashy, schlocky horror that centred on the body-parts-for-muthi trade. The campaign handed out a couple hundred pamphlets, in the style of those ridiculous pamphlets that offer penis enlargement, bad luck cure, womb cleaning etc that we see littered around town every day. The pamphlets offered money for body parts, and linked to a website that detailed the “doctor’s” cash-for-organs trade in more detail. The people who received the pamphlets went ape-shit, calls were made to the national media, everyone was pranked and much outrage ensued. The campaign was slammed by the Department of Health for trivialising a “Serious Problem”, and was pulled, effective immediately, complete with apology from the ad agency in question, and a promise to conduct an “internal disciplinary procedure”.
Pamphlet collected in Durban by Rosemary Lombard, 2009
My question is, what exactly is being done about this serious problem? Why do people get up in arms about a cash-for-body-parts hoax, but think its OK (and hilarious) for there to be pamphlets offering safe abortions, womb cleaning, AIDS cures and a whole manner of sexual health treatment that is not only bogus, but seriously harmful to those who pursue it. What effort is being made by the Department of Health to shut down these “doctors”? Most disturbing is the discriminatory gender ideas at the root of these so called treatments. Muthi to “make lover have sex with you”, and treatment for women for, among other things “cleaner vaginas, more willingness to have sex.”
These charlatan muthi men make a mockery of traditional healing, and the pamphlets and posters not only mislead the poor, vulnerable and uneducated, but reinforce negative stereotypes about traditional healing and the communities that take advantage of them. Is any work being done to address this “Serious Problem”, or do people only care so long as the content of said media panders to savage stereotypes of murderous muthi men lurking in the shadows to chop your heart out?
Pamphlet collected in Durban by Rosemary Lombard, 2009
fleurmach 