Like A Girl: The Always Campaign

Ram’s advertisement immediately begins by utilizing logos and pathos to embolden women to fight against stereotypes. First, the commercial’s narration uses a series of repetitive rhetorical questions to inspire the audacious emotions of the audience. Ram repeats “have you ever thought” multiple times to capture the female viewer’s attention. This technique establishes an understanding and inviting tone that prepares the viewer for Ram’s overarching message. Next, allowing the viewer to ponder these rhetorical questions, Ram briefly pauses the narration. Following this pause, Ram articulates their message: “You can break a stereotype and throw it into a whole ‘nother gear. Because

Advertising in a mass consumer society such as America is a very competitive industry. Advertising companies continually come up with new and more creative techniques of increasing sale. Advertising companies decide which group of people would be more attracted to a specific product and link that product to the feelings of excitement and anxiety of the targeted customers. The ads are carefully crafted bundles of images, frequently designed to associate the product with feelings of pleasure stemming from deep-seated fantasies and anxieties (Craig 197). For example, usually advertisements of beer and cars demonstrate masculine men, loners and free of

In the video Killing UsSoftly 4: Advertising's Image of Women it basically talks about how advertising effects a women's self-image. Jean Kilbourne has been talking about this issue for over 40 years and even after all this time she states, "really they have gotten worse. " Advertising is a promotion for a company to try to portray their product to the public and trick them into thinking they have to have this product to keep up with society's norms. After media was brought to Fiji they noticed that women were worrying more about their body image than ever before. It is sad to think that women in advertising are exposed in a manner to make young girls think that the most essential thing is how we look.

Recently American Eagle’s lingerie brand, Aerie, completely changed their advertising campaign to AerieReal. The AerieReal campaign consists of only un-retouched and no Photoshopped models. Before the AerieReal campaign, Aerie used models that were retouched and Photoshopped to make the models appear skinner and “more attractive”. The AerieReal campaign’s focus is to defy what other lingerie brands, such as Victoria’s Secret, sell in their advertisements. Aerie is trying to challenge the message of true beauty is only if you are skinny by saying that “The real you is sexy”. Aerie is accomplishing this by changing their advertisements in the hopes that girls will grow up to be socialized with a more positive and inclusive message, defy gender roles associated with women, and lastly, confront stereotypes of white and colored women.

For centuries, women have found it to be difficult to live up and be the standard “runaway model”. Women have the pressure to fit in to be considered beautiful since ads and media have distorted society in how they view and evaluate beauty. The false representation of models in the beauty commercials have made women want to replicate them even though they don’t know what’s behind the editing. Even though this is a huge matter, companies did not stand back but instead made more commercials that self-degrade women constantly, except one. The Dove Evolution Commercial- “Campaign for Real Beauty” focuses on the way they change women sending a strong message to women about beauty and what it really

The film that I will be reviewing is Jean Kilbourne’s “Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women” (Kilbourne). The overall purpose of this film was to educate the viewers of the severe distortion of the way the media portrays women in advertising. The film showed numerous ads where women are depicted as objects, both sexual and that of a man’s personal property. Women were also shown as the victims of violence in so many ads. The film addressed the effects that advertising has on eating disorders in young women. Anorexia and Bulemia are two of the disorders that are destroying young women in today’s society. These eating disorders not only affect the physical body but also destroy any self confidence or self esteem that the person may have.

In this world, girls and women are normally downgraded because people assume that girls are weak. The company Always wants to change that mindset. In the commercial #LikeAGirl by Always, the use of rhetoric in the advertisement is very effective in helping them persuade girls that doing things like a girl is something to be proud of, and to buy sanitary pads. In the Always #LikeAGirl commercial, the ad was very effective in convincing teenagers girls in adolescence that #LikeAGirl is not something to be ashamed off and to buy sanitary pads when comparing teenagers and guys to young girls.

Jean Kilbourne is an advocate for women and is leading a movement to change the way women are viewed in advertising. She opens up the curtains to reveal the hard truth we choose to ignore or even are too obtuse to notice. Women are objectified, materialized, and over-sexualized in order to sell clothes, products, ideas and more. As a woman, I agree with the position Kilbourne presents throughout her documentary Killing Us Softly 4: The Advertising’s Image of Women (2010) and her TEDx Talk The Dangerous Ways Ads See Women (2014.) She demonstrates time and again that these advertisements are dangerous and lead to unrealistic expectations of women.

Always “Like a Girl” commercial was not only a hit in the media world, but a hit to the hearts of many women across the nation. In this commercial Always attempts to reach out and inform Americans of the damage caused to a female’s confidence when they do finally hit that age in their lives where insecurities begin to exist. Positively using their credibility and reputation to target a worldwide issue among woman so that it gains enough awareness to hopefully get fixed. Women working their whole lives to break society’s doubt so that they aren’t classified under another demeaning stereotype when asked, “What does it mean to do something ‘Like a Girl?’’’.

In 2015 during the Superbowl, Procter and Gamble released an ad called “Like a Girl” representing the feminine product brand Always which was directed by Lauren Greenfield. P&G conducted research for the campaign finding that over half the women claimed they experienced a decline in confidence at puberty (Always, Procter & Gamble). The opportunity was clear, empowering girls during this time of their lives when confidence is at its lowest stage would give a powerful and purposeful role in how they would grow up to see themselves.The audience of this advertisement is a wide range of people, from those who watched the superbowl, and those who buy the variety of products P&G sell. The award-winning response Always #LikeAGirl campaign commercial, had turned a phrase that had become an insult into an empowering message for all young girls.

Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that

Found within narratives of human development, girls are being constructed as powerful and privileged agents of change (Gonick et. al, 2009). The Nike Foundation’s ‘The Girl Effect’ (Nike,2017) campaign follows on from other humanitarian campaigns, such as the Girl Up Campaign (UN, 2017), by arguing that adolescent girls hold the key to ending world poverty and transforming the developing world. Nike (2017) proposes that if they empower teenage girls they will then be able to combat poverty and improve the health and life expectancy of the entire developing world. This can be seen in the ‘girl effect’ images found in Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4 (Nike, 2017) where a

A new Barbie commercial challenges us to question, “What happens when girls are free to imagine they can be anything?” (“Imagine the Possibilities”). Mattel has created an inspiring and thought provoking ad. The ad, titled “Imagine the Possibilities,” was developed and published by Mattel as a promotion for Barbie Dolls. The ad was originally published on Mattel’s YouTube channel (Rose). To create a successful advertisement, Mattel targeted a particular audience. A very specific purpose was kept in mind as Mattel created the ad. Rhetorical appeals were boldly used throughout the ad to capture the audience’s attention.

This image is from the Bring Back Our Girls campaign. The campaign began when 230 school girls who were kidnapped from their dorm rooms by terrorists on April 16th 2014 in Nigeria. A recurring theme during this campaign was to make everyone aware of the women’s names. Some schools in Nigeria asked each student to select the name of one missing Chibok girl and pray every day for her return. The idea was that to know a person’s name is one step closer to knowing them more personally, so that way more people cared about getting them home safely and not letting this be another headline that gets swept under the rug. That’s what inspired me to focus on the names of the characters in the show.

In 2013, UN Women launched an ad campaign that revealed the prevalent and rampant sexism and discrimination against women worldwide. Memac Ogilvy and Mather Dubai, the creators of the advertisement, placed authentic Google search text boxes over the mouth of the woman pictured, as if to silence her voice. By using a Muslim woman in a hijab, real searches via Google, and highlighting the true, subconscious feelings and attitude of the audience, the advertisement attempts to expose the negative biases towards women, ranging from stereotypes to blatant denial of their rights.