Posted on 04/22/2008 3:05:03 PM PDT by PercivalWalks
"The way the advertising industry portrays men has drawn increasing scrutiny in both the trade press and the mainstream media. Defenders of the status quo -- in which men are depicted as irresponsible fathers and lazy, foolish husbands -- are starting to feel outnumbered. It's an understandable feeling...
"The evidence is clear: 'Man as idiot' isn't going over very well these days."
My new column, Advertisers: Men Are Not Idiots (Advertising Age, 4/14/08), co-authored with Richard Smaglick of www.fathersandhusbands.org, appeared recently in Advertising Age, one of the largest advertising industry publications. To write a Letter to the Editor, click on editor@adage.com.
The piece is part of Advertising Age's "CMO Strategy" section--a section directed towards marketing and advertising executives [Chief Marketing Officers]. Our column there is an opportunity to, as they say, "Speak truth to power."
In the column, we gave three specific suggestions for the advertising industry:
"Create more ads that are father-positive. Some recent examples include AT&T's touching father-daughter ad 'Monkey'; First Choice Holidays' 'Slow-Motion Hugs'; and Ford's father-son ad 'We Know.'
"As we consider whether it's wise to make men the butt of every joke, we should also consider the joke itself. Many see the 1960s as the golden age of advertising. Those who crafted the ads of that era created work of superb quality, seldom if ever resorting to the contempt, shame and aggressive ridicule of today's ads.
"When an ad does need to poke fun at somebody, stop automatically defaulting to men as fools."
Glenn Sacks, www.GlennSacks.com
[Note: If you or someone you love is faced with a divorce or needs help with child custody, child support, false accusations, Parental Alienation, or other family law or criminal law matters, ask Glenn for help by clicking here.]
I’ve noticed Home Depot commercials to be particularly egregious in this respect.
Well, I for one am completely fed up with the stupid white man commercials.
We can be a little dense at times.
At times, yes.
All the time, no.
Buncha dumbies.
I wish this would be the thin tip of a backlash against overbearing feminist man-hating tactics of the last decades. Too many children are raised without fathers-women even purposely bar men from being fathers, except as cash source-—fathers have been portrayed as weak, ineffectual boobs, irrelevant, etc. I hope men have had enough of it and will fight back, especially using their financial clout. Weakening the position of men in this way has only weakened society in general.
Wouldn't revenue dollars be the most reliable indicator of whether this type of advertising is successful?
Not just “stupid”, but “criminal”.
I’ve noticed a public-service ad recently for cell-phone text “Amber alerts” dramatizing the kidnapping of an “African-American girl” by a “Caucasian male”.
Today’s advertising, like today’s entertainment media, thinks it has to be cute or cutting edge. Which explains why the commercials, movies and music just gets worse by the day.
bflr = bump for later reading
The white guy is always the dunce... Yeah, we’ve noticed.
As are commercials for V-8 juice.
That one made me want to drive a coal-burning SUV to a rainforest clear-and-burn site and do a little damage with a gas-powered chainsaw. While smoking a cigar, of course.
But it leads people to get sloppy. I once heard a commercial that went:
Woman's voice 1: "What's the difference between men and pigs?"
Woman's voice 2: "Pigs don't watch the superbowl!"
Yuk yuk. It was for a car dealership. Very, very stupid. I'm guessing that agency got their money up front. The problem is that you purchase advertising time in blocks and when you get a little stinker like this going sometimes it's not easy to turn it off, and when you don't, you don't always know how people react until somebody takes the trouble to tell you, usually in loud voices. The damage is long done.
One can avoid this by focus-grouping prospective commercials, which - surprise! - costs money. And if your focus group isn't large enough to contain an accurate demographic distribution including those despised white males, then money spent here is wasted. Cutting any of these corners can put a grossly offensive commercial out there, and has.
These commercials are just as goofy and laughable as the ones that show the Black guy as the ‘rocket scientist’ type with the correct answer in every situation. (The exact opposite of what we see in everyday life)
The irony here amuses me. According to feminists, the same group (white, middle class men) that is supposedly SO stupid is also the same group that is in charge of the patriarchy which is oppressing women and monorities. Makes me wonder, if they’re THAT stupid, how’d they end up completely in charge of society (as they supposedly are, by feminist “reasoning”)?
I don’t object to any one ad depicting its adult male “stars” as buffoons.
What bothers me is the prevalence of this theme — particularly when OTHER demographics within the ads (children, women) are shown to be “the smart ones who solve the problems caused by Idiotic Male.” Can’t clever ad writers make a similar point without going to this tactic so often?
This is just plain wrong, were bitter, not stupid. Don't they know anything?!
As long as women make most of the purchasing decisions in American households, there will always be some “dumb husband” commercials.
A major hardware, building and garden supply retail store in my community about a year ago undertook in its radio commericals to feature females as ther “go to experts” for every aspect of home repair, maintenance, construction, etc. It was starkly noticeable, as I was a bit familiar with the long-time employee roster of this business, and there had not been very many female “expert consultants” until they were near-instantly called into being in response to the zeitgeist.
I take it you recently made a gun purchase? Or did you just attend church?
Buy beer...now...
I agree.
“Well, I for one am completely fed up with the stupid white man commercials.”
Well, if it is portraying supid white men as Democrats (which is not far from the truth at all) then that works for me.
Consider: Who are the creative types who work on Madison Ave. Certainly not Straight men nor Republicans. They are portraying themselves - Gay, white Democrats. Wha, Wha, Wha....
Try watching children’s cartoons and shows. The dad is always a buffoon. The Mom is always the one the kids turn to.
OK, I’m in for a truckload. Whatever.
I remember when she was hot, too.
(She’s currently fat and pregnant.)
I, for one, am fed up with the “stupid white male” commercials and make mental notes of the companies that use them and try to avoid purchasing their products.
Like this one for a new hospital?
http://www.seton.net/media/Williamson_Open_Radio.mp3
What are they trying to say? Potential patients should suck it up, and quit acting like they’ve broken both legs if they’ve had heart trouble....
Are they trying to run patients off?
I agree. I think complaining about commercials or programs is unlikely to be effective if the complainers make no changes to their buying or viewing habits.
Once I was at a group meeting where the women began to discuss the "matriarchy", a time long past when women ran the world and everything was hunky-dory.
Someone wondered how women had lost the reigns of control...I piped up, "because men are smarter, obviously !, then laughed. There were a few gasps, then dead silence. They never discussed it again ( at least in front of me...), but it was oh, so sweet.
I find the “stupid white male” commercials somewhat annoying, but what really drives me up the wall are commercials that feature little kids who can’t speak clearly or sing on key. Every time I see the Smokey Bear ad with the little girl singing “The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” it makes want to go start a forest fire.
Nothing is more, pure white male than the pure evil,big tobacco executives in the anti tobacco ads, no women or minorities are cast for those roles, (paid for by taxpayers).
milf= ahhh, never mind.
Question: Have there any TV shows since, oh, the 1970’s, where the women — not the men — are the goofy ones? You know, like “I love Lucy”, “My Little Margie”, “I married Joan”, etc.
No female human in the house overnight, Check.
Not getting PO'ed about stupid commercials on rancid programming? Priceless.
Who would have thought that being a bitter old man, too cheap to buy Viagra would be so fulfilling?
And I had time to spend with my elderly mom, my kiddo and the most current grandbaby. Life is good.
/johnny/
In fact, it’s nearly impossible to find a positive commercial, or tv show, or movie, etc. etc. for the persecuted white male.
And of course there is no agenda or collusion, or peer pressure or world view or economic imperative or social model or out and out hatred among the management of these endeavors. They are just objective.
Other than the internet, the media has been a daily lesson in liberalism for years. The real issue is that conservatives are disorganized, outnumbered, underfunded, and inept in countering this force. More important, many conservative members have basically accepted the liberal premises, have no real conviction in countering the issue, and merely try to slow or slightly modify the direction. Additionally, if they fight they do so in the liberals playground, rather than choosing more effective venues. That is why we are losing.
“Magnum, P.I.” had lots of damsels in distress with very pretty hair - and many of them weren’t too bright.
The HR Block commercial where the husband is trying to do the taxes and the wife starts telling him to "ask the box." I don't know who that was supposed to appeal to, the husband was a dork and the wife was a b-i-t-c-h.
The Doritos commercial where three guys are looking out the window and talking about how it takes four guys to work on a trench. A woman is working at a computer and solves some problem and the guys all high five.
Some car commercial, I think Ford, where the wife and kids pick up the husband after his motoX bike breaks down. Of course, this was during the period when Ford was doing it's best to drive off every customer they'd ever had.
The same way that the "stupid, illiterate" Dubya became an all-powerful "facist dictator." Lefties always go both ways.
I believe the vast majority of television and print advertising — with the exception of anything related to sporting events — is aimed at a predominantly female audience.
Since I am now over 60, I am somewhat safe from them.
Naturally that changed their prospective advertising campaign a great deal. We weren't their ad agency but we did focus group the prospective ads against an entirely different test population than they originally thought they wanted.
Putting together a national advertising campaign costs an ungodly amount of money. Most ad and market research agencies are in urban areas and hence recruit their focus groups from an urban population, so you get a skew that way built into the system. A random selection of respondents throughout the United States for the white male 25-35 demographic might pull up one urban newspaper reporter, one small-town fireman, and a rural bass fisherman. A random selection of respondents within two area codes of downtown Seattle won't do that. And pulling the outliers into town for a focus group is an expensive undertaking.
Corporations with mega-buck sales don't really want to tick anyone off but very often they won't know they're doing that until too late. In some cases, again, depending on the product, it may not matter anyway. In some it matters a lot, and sometimes disappointing sales performance within a target demographic is the only way they find it out, and they'll only learn even that through further market research.
That's what little I learned of the game when I was in it. Glad to hear from anyone else who has (especially the analysts).
I can only speak for myself, but I’m a woman and it disgusts me.
bfl
I lol’d
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