Selling Insecurities
The television is probably more important to your mom than your nagging. It's entirely possible (not really) that your family might be willing to forsake your education if given a choice between paying for tuition and paying for cable. Annoying soaps aside, what runs the channels are ads. This is where advertisement firms come up with brilliant ideas to entice us into buying some of the not-so-brilliant products.
So how exactly do these ads strive to capture our attention? Research shows it's quite simple. Dancing women. Yes, that's the answer to everything (at least in Bangladesh). I'll be damned if I go through five minutes of channel surfing without once coming across some girls in a cheesy dance routine championing the use of shaving cream. Hungry? Have a biscuit and girls will dance around you. Getting bad cell reception? Change networks while girls dance around you. Having second thoughts about the refrigerator you just bought? Throw in a few women dancing around said refrigerator and all's right with the world again. Looks like we got it all figured out.
Nosy and curious as we are, we decided to ask around about the general response to these ads. It's disconcerting how many people have actually accepted this and become immune to the blatant objectifying of women. “You have to admit, it's kinda funny,” says Anik, a brain-dead TV nut. “I mean, it's hard seeing the connection between dancing women and toothpaste at first, but then it all makes sense. They are dancing out of relief because they aren't gonna faint every time you go up to talk to them any more. Quite brilliant.” Umm, okay.
Jokes aside, this issue does give some people grief. “The ad firms have it easy because they know it's a winning formula,” says Reya, through gritted teeth. “This is still a male-dominated society, whether we like it or not. It's changing gradually, but mindsets aren't, apparently. When they don't want to bother coming up with something original, they go with the one guaranteed to rake in sales because they have men as their target-audience. What does that say about you guys?” It is a pretty ridiculous strategy but….dancing women.
This brings us to the ads that are directed towards women, which in our country is usually synonymous to fairness creams/soaps/anything with the word “fair”. This could either mean two things: 1) Women indulge in colourism and are extremely shallow or 2) We like to think of women as single-minded human beings living for the sole purpose of being attractive to men. So, that means these ad strategies are sure to fail, right? Astronomical sales suggest otherwise.
“It's got more to do with the need to be accepted than anything else,” according to Nuzhat. “But then we're back to the argument of all that's wrong with society. It's a vicious cycle.”
Here's where this writer feels compelled to make an argument for marketing geniuses and their ads: they're quite shrewd, really. The prerogative is money. Feeding off of our insecurities and desires seems to be the way to go. Sounds cruel, I know. But this is business, capiche?
A new but widespread practice beginning to make its way onto local ads, too, is “female dismemberment”. Contrary to what it sounds like, it does not mean cutting people up and putting them on exhibit. This is where the ads increase sales by encouraging women to view themselves as many individual pieces, rather than a whole. Don't have perfect lips or perfectly coiffed hair? You're not “beautiful”. So, the idea is women basically have to be perfect for our gratification. But, hey, this is a two-way street. Men have to be flawless too, then. No takers? I rest my case.
Budding wise-guy and all-round pretentious dude, Mohaimin, takes a crack at this conundrum, “It's difficult to actually portray things of substance through ads. Sometimes it pulls through, sometimes it doesn't. So why take the risk when you know people are gonna fall for the shallow? It's a visual medium, so we obviously want to see tangible results or benefits for buying something.”
Thus we come to the rather tedious and unsavory conclusion that we are what's wrong with the ads. Much of the time, when something offends us or annoys us we lay docile or are too lazy to do anything about it. There are counter arguments to this and it can be said that women are not the only ones being objectified, men are too. But as I haven't yet come across an advertisement with dudes dancing in support of clean underwear (thank heavens for that), this is the more pressing issue. And contrary to the popular urban myth, you CAN make a difference. Read one of those books collecting dust on your shelf and maybe one day we can dare to dream of a place where people can be confident about themselves and their beliefs and, hopefully, don't need dancing women or men around them to market toothpaste.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Dissing local ads doesn't really mean that the foreign ones are any better. For all their alleged “superiority” over us, they're worse (at least here the comedy factor is off the charts). The hints they drop are, shall we say, less subtle (hard to imagine, but yes, we are subtle). This is one of those instances where I'm thankful we still employ archaic methods like song and dance to sell stuff. A very good example of this is certain brands of deodorants where women go lusting over you after a few sprays. Don't be shocked when this doesn't happen in real life. The most acknowledgement your use of deodorant will get from the opposite sex is less pinched noses, but hey, at least you tried.
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