The Automotive Media: Last Bastion of Sanity in the World of Political Correctness Welcome to the automotive world, the last holdout in the battle against political correctness. This is one of the few places left where one can make a statement about women and men and not be assaulted with court cases or be accused of being a bigot. In the automotive media, it is still acceptable to represent men in business suits driving luxury vehicles, and to show mothers driving their kids in a minivan. There is one simple reason that the automotive media has remained unadulterated by political correctness—money. As a private industry, both car manufacturers and aftermarket companies have one goal, to sell cars and car related products, and to make money while doing so. As such, these companies use marketing techniques that will most effective reach their target market, which is the true populace, not the world envisioned by political correctness(hereafter to be referred to as PC). For this reason, the marketing techniques used by the automotive industry give us a more realistic view of society and how men and women view themselves. The first image I will examine is the most traditional. This is an advertisement for the new Jaguar XK model that was published in the September 2006 issue of Car and Driver. The target audience of this ad is extremely obvious—middle-aged to older males. The man here is depicted as a professional, and there is nothing else depicted to counteract this stereotype. However, this ad is very effective, because Jaguars are rather expensive the male businessman is the target audience with the largest sales potential. In addition, Jaguars are also known for providing not only comfort and class, but also horsepower ... ... middle of paper ... ...are however a few outlets that are not constricted by the ideals of PC, and one of them is the automotive media. In this realm, men can be viewed as masculine, women can be feminine, and it is realized that they view the world in different ways. This private industry provides us with a way to view our society as it naturally is, not through the tint of a new political vision. Works Cited Car and Driver Sep 2006 Lavine, Howard. "Depicting Women as Sex Objects in Television Advertising: Effects on Body Dissatisfaction." Sage Publications 1999 1. 24 Oct 2006 . Naderi, John. "Loud and Clear." Super Street Nov 2006: 44. "Volvo Unveils Car Designed by Women." Road and Track 2004 24 Oct 2006 women.htm>.
Targeted Audiences: Which One Suits You? According to Steve Craig in Signs of Life in the USA, the economic structure of the television industry has a direct effect on the placement and content of all television programs and commercials. Craig is a professor in the department of radio, television, and film at the University of North Texas, Craig has written widely on television, radio history, and gender and media. His most recent book is Out of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America (2009). Craig talks about the analysis of four different television commercials, showing how advertisers carefully craft their ads to appeal, respectively, to male and female consumers.
Five hundred electric cars were produced by the Pope Manufacturing Company in 1897. According to Scharff, this was after Colonel Albert A. Pope, the president of that company, decided not to concentrate "on noisy or smelly gasoline-powered cars, but instead, on clean, quiet electric vehicles." ("Femininity and the Electric Car" p.75) The Pope Manufacturing Company clearly targeted women as customers. This is evident in their advertising strategy. For example, Scharff says, "As Pope suggested in a 1903 advertisement for the Pope-Waverly electric model ‘electrics…will appeal to anyone interested in an absolutely noiseless, odorless, clean and stylish rig that is always ready and that, mile for mile, can be operated at less cost than any other type of motor car.’ Lest this message escape those it was intended to attract, the text accompanied a picture of a delighted woman driver piloting a a similar female passenger." (p.75) With such blatant advertising can be clearly seen that the electric car was targeted at women. Later advertisements which were also directed at women contained Victorian language. According to Scharff, this separate spheres ideology "vastly oversimplified both human relations and social forces." Scharff then gave an example of a man who is stereotypically rugged seeking shelter from the rain and of women who are stereotypically soft-spoken yelling at their children to illustrate this oversimplification.
Stephenson, T., Stover, W. J., & Villamor, M. (1997). Sell Me Some Prestige! The Portrayol of Women in Business-Related Ads. Journal of Popular Culture, 255-271.
Have you ever seen an advertisement for a product and could immediately relate to the subject or the product in that advertisement? Companies that sell products are always trying to find new and interesting ways to get buyers and get people’s attention. It has become a part of our society today to always have products being shown to them. As claimed in Elizabeth Thoman’s essay Rise of the Image Culture: Re-Imagining the American Dream, “…advertising offered instructions on how to dress, how to behave, how to appear to others in order to gain approval and avoid rejection”. This statement is true because most of the time buyers are persuaded by ads for certain products.
Advertisers aim for an attractive advertisement depends on what audience they wanted to aim for. This is a way to make a good way of attracting people to make efficient money by using stereotypes, and psychologically
The advertisement I have chosen to analyze is a Breitling Watch ad located in a Sports Illustrated magazine on pages 3 & 4. The advertisement is promoting Breitling's new watch; The Avenger Hurricane. Breitling intentionally chose to make the watch black and gold to match their company's colors, they chose a close up image of the face of the watch to focus on the details, and they also purposely used flash for the photo to show the perfection in their stitching as well as the overall beauty of the face of the watch. Since Breitling is a high end boutique store, it is not surprising that they would create a stunning visual advertisement to help increase sales of their expensive products. Breitling’s target market is identified by using the demographics,
Common sense seems to dictate that commercials just advertise products. But in reality, advertising is a multi-headed beast that targets specific genders, races, ages, etc. In “Men’s Men & Women’s Women”, author Steve Craig focuses on one head of the beast: gender. Craig suggests that, “Advertisers . . . portray different images to men and women in order to exploit the different deep seated motivations and anxieties connected to gender identity.” In other words, advertisers manipulate consumers’ fantasies to sell their product. In this essay, I will be analyzing four different commercials that focuses on appealing to specific genders.
There has always been the cliché of gender roles in toddlers that girls play with dolls and boys play with tools and cars. Is that what is expected of children of each sex, or do adults not know any better? When my male cousin was born when I was sixteen, the baby was showered with gifts of plastic screwdrivers, wrenches, saws, Bob the Builder accessories, and of course--toy cars. Why do we have this preoccupation that little boys--who in turn become men—have the desire for model cars? Since Karl Benz designed a practical car with an internal combustion engine in 1885, cars have been deemed the toy for boys. In Benz’s time, automobiles were considered a gentleman’s luxury; they were to be driven only by men who could afford them. Women, considered to be incapable of driving in the early 1900s, were supposed to be passengers along for a ride. When advertising came around once cheap automobiles could be produced in the 1920s, it was no surprise that nearly every single advertisement was geared towards men. In Michele Ramsey’s article on automobile advertising and gender, the advertising that was geared towards women was used to support that buying an automobile would make one’s social status climb due to attractiveness. Also, no women ads featured them in the economic world, only in caring for others and that buying a car helped one “be a good mother”. The early ads focused on men were the subtle things such as the boasting of the sheer power a car had available, or the image of a man catching the eye of a woman in his new car. Into the 1950s, the standard advertising for the newly evolved sports car usually featured a young man in a Corvette for example, with women looki...
Have you ever taken a look at someone’s car and thought you could imagine what the driver must be like. Just by examining their vehicle you could tell their gender, race, or maybe even their social standing. I don't mean to alarm you but your car is talking. It is saying a lot about your attitude and your personality. Yes, we are what we drive. There are many various stereotypes relating cars to their drivers. Who would have ever imagined you could be categorized because of an engine sitting on four wheels. Society also puts a lot of significance in what kind of car the media thinks we should possess. You see advertisements in the media all the time trying to make it appear like this car was manufactured strictly to fit you and your lifestyle. In the materialistic world we live in people are often judged by their inanimate possessions, however, the fact still remains that your vehicle can determine a lot about who you are.
In the essay “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” author and philosopher Susan Bordo discusses the history and current state of male representation in advertisements. While using her feminist background, Bordo compares and contrasts the aspects of how men and women are portrayed in the public eye. She claims that there has been a paradigm shift the media with the theory that not just women are being objectified in the public eye, but also men too. Since the mid-1970s, with the introduction of Calvin Klein commercials, men have started to become more dehumanized and regarded as sex symbols. In a similar fashion to how Bordo describes gender, race plays a similar role in the media. People of all different ethnicities and cultures are being categorized into an oversimplified and usually unfair image by the media over basic characteristics.
In the Vanity Fair advertisement, the explicit purpose of the visual is to give the viewer an understanding of a marketed product—the Kelly Springfield tires. Regardless of the gender of the viewer, the advertisement carries the same purpose. The implicit connotations of the visual of a woman sticking her head into her car advertises to male viewers the notion that women must not be able to understand mechanics; the tires must be fantastic enough to warrant no “trouble from that source,” leaving men to have one less burden in relation to their automobiles. Female viewers come to understand that with Kelly Springfield tires, there is one less problem to fear while
Mercedes Benz is a German car manufacturer known for being “the best or nothing,” their slogan represents not only their line of luxury vehicles but also their business. Mercedes has always had a successful reputation for magazine ads, hence this one. Latest from the advertising team, the cover shows off the new 2017 Mercedes-Benz E-Class. Packed with all new advanced safety features such as self-braking, self-correcting, and self-parking. The ad showcases not only the exterior of the car but also the lavish interior. This technique quickly grabs the reader’s attention and achieves its purpose of informing consumers of “the future of transportation.”
Women do not tend to have the same type of relationship with their automobiles as men do. In Virginia Scharff’s article, “Femininity and the Electric car”, this relationship between women and cars is explained in depth. Two websites that show how women look at automobiles are, www.womanmotorist.com and www.cybergrrl.com/fun/womenandcars/.
Curry and Clarke’s article believe in a strategy called “visual literacy” which develops women and men’s roles in advertisements (1983: 365). Advertisements are considered a part of mass media and communications, which influence an audience and impact society as a whole. Audiences quickly begin to rely on messages sent through advertisements and can create ideologies of women and men. These messages not only are extremely persuasive, but they additionally are effective in product consumption in the media (Curry and Clarke 1983:
Advertising in business is a type of marketing communication used to encourage, persuade, or manipulate a customer to take or continue to take some action. The desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering.