Women, Ads and Stereotypes

When will advertising people get that not all women fall the same segment.  I get annoyed when I see advertising which targets the woman who only cooks, shops or gets her hair done.  Like these two ads for example.

StereotypicalAds
StereotypicalAds2

The first one was for a Kuwaiti Women forum, it just talks to the Kuwaiti woman who just wants to change her look, loose weight, find a recipe or shop.  It there are so many successful, intelligent and amazing Kuwaiti women out there.  Politicians, artists, scientists and so much more.  I didn’t click because I was so annoyed and they might have other topics that might be interesting but they marketed themselves a little on the shallow side.  Even the picture they chose was not very expressive of your average Kuwaiti woman, unless she’s shopping crazy.  The second one is for mobile internet connection.  There’s a billboard by my house that has this ad and every time I pass by it it aggravates me.  Yes, i do look for recipes online and yes I window shop online.  But there is so much more that I do on the internet.  Why isn’t there an ad that targets professional working women, who use their internet connections to do research or business. University students use the internet to study, that too might be a healthier more positive image.  Even friends connecting would be a better image even though it might touch another stereotype of women being too talkative.  How about a mother and her children looking at educating websites or looking for childcare articles.  I sometimes wonder about the effectiveness of these ads.  Has anyone every studied ads, women and the middle east.  Do women even care or is it just me?  Is anyone else offended from this kind of sexist/stereotypical advertising?

Funny Tea Ad

Subliminal – Derren Brown

Derren Brown is controversial illusionist, hypnotist and the presenter of Mind Control on BBC.  He has come up with the most interesting shows illustrating how many techniques can be used to communicate and change people’s minds on the subliminal level without telling them directly anything.  I have always been a firm believer in things like this and NLP.
This video is probably one of the most interesting ones because he tricks two people in advertising who probably make a living creating ads that speak to the public subliminally. It makes you think about the amount of subliminal messages we are bombarded with every day and just how little control we have over them.

Do you hate loud commercials?

Apparently they are not really louder we just think they are louder because of the way they are made.

Generally, the producers of an ad have 30 seconds to get in a lot of information, so the words don’t have those natural pauses between them… they’re all jammed in together.

Then you add music, to give it some energy, and to fill in all those annoying noiseless gaps where the voice-over person takes a breath. Sometimes, the audio engineer will even “de-breath” the ad, deleting the sounds of breathing so more words can be fitted in.

To read the rest of the explanation.