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Culled from Tumblr (hence the via via via). I think the original poster is here.
On Super Bowl Ads:
Look, I don’t want to be all “if you only watch one major sporting event per year, perhaps your opinions on the ads running during them are inevitably going to be shallow and trite,” but here’s the deal: the only TV programs men watch (in any great number) are sports. That is not a stereotype: that is a Nielson-certified factoid. What that means is that, if you want to reach a male demographic with a TV ad, the only choice you have is to reach to all of it at once. And that necessarily means that you have to shoot for the lowest common denom-nom-nom-inator. With women, advertisers have the luxury of both assuming they are going to be exposed to multiple media streams (so they can spread out a bunch of subtler ads over disparate programming and go for a cumulative effect) and being able to target women by their rough taste group. And so you can run ads that “make sense” more, in that an ad run during Oprah makes sense for that audience and an ad run during The Rachel Zoe Project makes sense for that audience, which somehow seems less insulting? But with men, you have no such luxuries. Advertisers have to run extremely blatant ads that sacrifice any hope of getting niche demographics by pandering as hard as possible to the largest demographic. Which means basically Dane Cook jokes in ad form.
But let’s talk about what those ads are portraying. People call them sexist, which they are, but that’s not the point. Images of women being treated like objects and masculinity being defined in stereotypical ways don’t validate a vision of themselves men already have. Instead, it makes their current lives seem inadequate, or tries to, anyway. It takes their relationship with their wives and children, a relationship that is precious and meaningful and more important than anything else they probably have, and makes it seem emasculating because you have to drive a lame car. It takes fleeting anxieties and tries to turn them into a full-blown syndrome. It takes the reality of men’s real and human relationships with the opposite sex and makes that seem like you are pussy-whipped. And since you can’t actually change those things-why would you want to change being a father and a decent human being?-you will need to compensate by buying the proffered product.
This is not to say that this appeal works consciously or directly. But it is to say that the ads are intended to work on men in almost exactly the same way that ads targeting women are intended to work on women. All of this is cloaked in humor or empowerment, but it’s really communicating inadequacy. The men’s ads just have the additional unfortunate side effect of being demeaning to their female viewers. My point here is that we shouldn’t take the appeals made by male-targeted ads and assume they reflect a genuine feeling in men. Rather, it reflects a feeling advertisers would like to induce in men. To blithely assume they have been successful is like watching daytime TV and assuming all women are overprotective mothers with undiagnosed OCD. Or like, say, assuming the attitudes of 20-something artsy urban men reflect the feelings of men in general. Just saying!
On Super Bowl Ads:
Look, I don’t want to be all “if you only watch one major sporting event per year, perhaps your opinions on the ads running during them are inevitably going to be shallow and trite,” but here’s the deal: the only TV programs men watch (in any great number) are sports. That is not a stereotype: that is a Nielson-certified factoid. What that means is that, if you want to reach a male demographic with a TV ad, the only choice you have is to reach to all of it at once. And that necessarily means that you have to shoot for the lowest common denom-nom-nom-inator. With women, advertisers have the luxury of both assuming they are going to be exposed to multiple media streams (so they can spread out a bunch of subtler ads over disparate programming and go for a cumulative effect) and being able to target women by their rough taste group. And so you can run ads that “make sense” more, in that an ad run during Oprah makes sense for that audience and an ad run during The Rachel Zoe Project makes sense for that audience, which somehow seems less insulting? But with men, you have no such luxuries. Advertisers have to run extremely blatant ads that sacrifice any hope of getting niche demographics by pandering as hard as possible to the largest demographic. Which means basically Dane Cook jokes in ad form.
But let’s talk about what those ads are portraying. People call them sexist, which they are, but that’s not the point. Images of women being treated like objects and masculinity being defined in stereotypical ways don’t validate a vision of themselves men already have. Instead, it makes their current lives seem inadequate, or tries to, anyway. It takes their relationship with their wives and children, a relationship that is precious and meaningful and more important than anything else they probably have, and makes it seem emasculating because you have to drive a lame car. It takes fleeting anxieties and tries to turn them into a full-blown syndrome. It takes the reality of men’s real and human relationships with the opposite sex and makes that seem like you are pussy-whipped. And since you can’t actually change those things-why would you want to change being a father and a decent human being?-you will need to compensate by buying the proffered product.
This is not to say that this appeal works consciously or directly. But it is to say that the ads are intended to work on men in almost exactly the same way that ads targeting women are intended to work on women. All of this is cloaked in humor or empowerment, but it’s really communicating inadequacy. The men’s ads just have the additional unfortunate side effect of being demeaning to their female viewers. My point here is that we shouldn’t take the appeals made by male-targeted ads and assume they reflect a genuine feeling in men. Rather, it reflects a feeling advertisers would like to induce in men. To blithely assume they have been successful is like watching daytime TV and assuming all women are overprotective mothers with undiagnosed OCD. Or like, say, assuming the attitudes of 20-something artsy urban men reflect the feelings of men in general. Just saying!