Like A Girl: The Always Campaign

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?’’’.

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

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

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.

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.

At the top of this ad, the words “COVER GIRL” are printed in big size which makes it easy to spot. Under the Cover Girl, consumers can read Cover Girl’s famous slogan “Easy, Breezy, Beautiful” which is meant to send the message that Cover Girl products give them a natural beauty. The color of these logos usually matches the color of the product that they advertise. In this ad, Cover Girl uses the phrase “Insta-Gorgous” to introduce their new product; the ad catches the attention of the younger generation, who is obsessed with social networking, by linking the product to instagram. The add also encourages the viewers to use the product, take pictures and instagram them to #covergirl. The writing on the ad says “ A do-it-all foundation that’s insta-natural, insta-shine free, insta-lasting and insta-gorgeous”, which describes all the qualities that consumers look in a foundation. This is a foundation that gives you a natural beauty and lasts all day long. Cover Girl manipulates women into buying their products by using colorful ads that catch the consumers’ eyes and smart logos that give the consumers the necessary

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

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.

I have chosen to analyze the Girl Scouts advertisement provided in the book. The purpose of this ad is to convince young girls to join Girl Scouts. The targeted audience would be young girls and their parents. Ethos are immediately established when you spot the well-known logo of the respected Girl Scouts organization. This advertisement appeals to logos through the use of pictures. The main picture is a black and white image picturing three girls looking rather bored and silent. Below this main picture are four colorful images of young girls involved in fun activities including rock climbing and canoeing. The contrast between these two pictures appeals to logos because the idea is made clear to the audience that the girls would rather be

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.

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

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 this analysis, the author examines the staging of male and female subjects in visual discourse by deconstructing advertisements that involve gendered subjects, examine gender on an institutional level, and look at gender as a performance. Advertisements are the most conventional ways to portray commercial realism, something that could be real because they don’t look peculiar or weird- they look normal. The big question asked by Erving Goffman, author of the book, “Gender Advertisements” is why do these advertisements not look strange to us when in fact they really are (Jhally)?

The article “The #LikeAGirl commercial is no way to empower young women” by the LA Times strongly suggest that this campaign is no way to empower girls and women around the world. As stated in this article “Running in place will always make you look as though you’re running like a girl. That’s because it’s not really running. It’s telling your audience, “Look at me, running!” -- which is a girl thing to do” (Allen, 2015). This article is suggesting that this commercial will only enhance the stereotypical views put label as being like a girl, and that the fact that the advertisement is for women’s menstrual pads does not help either. I believe this article has a lot wrong with it. Although yes in some people’s eyes this campaign may enhance the views of a stereotypical girl in