“Hands that do dishes can feel soft as your face, with mild green – Fairy Liquid!”
An advertising jingle for a popular brand of washing
up liquid
Do you pay much attention to adverts you see on
tv? Do they influence your behaviour, or
perhaps even make you think about your life in a different way?
Presumably they must have some effect on people. If they didn’t influence us, then companies
would be wasting huge amounts of money creating clever thirty-second films
trying to associate their products with things like success, or
sexiness, or beauty.
And what if adverts are even more powerful than you had
realised? What if your young daughter were
damaged by seeing the following advert?
A mother and father watch as their two children play on the
floor. The naughty children get
too excited and spill food and drink all over the floor. Oops!
Mummy sighs as she knows she will have to clean up. But everything works out in the end when
Mummy uses an amazing new cleaning product that gets rid of the mess in
no time at all. Daddy looks up from
his newspaper and is really impressed.
Did you find anything wrong with this advert? It may now be banned in the UK by the
Advertising Standards Authority for promoting gender stereotypes. It suggests that cleaning up is a woman’s
responsibility, since the father did nothing to help.
So are adverts made by groups of evil men, plotting
ways to keep women under their control?
Are they deliberately using their adverts to shape society into what
they want it to be?
Or are they just trying to make some money? Maybe they don’t care who does the cleaning,
as long as they buy the company’s cleaning product. Perhaps the reason they show a woman doing
the cleaning is that their market research shows that women use cleaning
products more than men. In other words,
they are reflecting the way society is, rather than trying to shape it.
Either way, I don’t think that advertising is really such a
powerful tool for shaping society. I
grew up watching adverts like the Fairy Liquid ad. It always showed a beautiful woman washing
dishes and smiling, pleased that the special product wouldn’t damage her lovely
soft hands. And yet washing the dishes
has become my responsibility. Maybe I
should complain to my wife. Years of
sexist adverts have damaged me and I am now incapable of doing the washing
up. I am also too worried about
maintaining my lovely soft hands.
Vocabulary:
a jingle – a very short tune with words, made to be easy to
remember
an advert/ an ad – an advertisement or commercial;
information designed to help sell a product
to associate A with B – to make people see a connection
between A and B
naughty – especially of children, badly behaved or difficult
to control
to get rid of – of something unwanted such as rubbish or a
stain, to removen no time at all – very quickly
to be banned – to be prohibited; not to be allowed
a gender stereotype – a simple and fixed idea about how men
and women are, or behave etc.
to plot – to plan, especially of something secret or harmful
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