Irritating Ad Trends

1) Seemingly everyone, from Visa to Cricket, now has an ad full of gangly, tone-deaf people singing pop songs in public, with jump cuts to connect their snatches of awkward mewl together. Actually, this is probably meant to signify “togetherness” and “spontaneity” and other things GenY consumers supposedly shell out to feel associated with. Thing is, most of these “singers” are excruciatingly bad, the sort of people who’d cause actual pain if they sang in actual public. Cricket claims you’ll get respect online.

2) Next up: auto insurers and their mascots, whether they be Progressive’s simpering, uncanny Cusack byblow, Geico’s triptych of uninspired corporate symbols, or SafeAuto’s remarkably graceless references to The Office. The idea may be that auto insurance is a faceless industry that consumers need personified; true or not, these are living spambots.

3) “My life is unique.” Preferred pitch for free checking accounts and Axe products. Usually features a series of rapid-fire beats depicting quirky, unique activities like partying with teenagers, flirting with girls, riding a truck, eating a sandwich, dancing with a sweatband, having sex with people in rabbit suits, taking pictures with friends, taking pictures with eccentric strangers, playing on a giant metal dinosaur, climbing stairs, having sleepovers, high-fiving, and so forth, in order to establish that the protagonist needs special accommodation or products with unusual resilience just for being so goddamn on all the time.

Axe’s Sexism

There’s a lot of anti-male sentiment in today’s TV ads. This seems natural enough. Ads play on the target demo’s desires, prejudices and neuroses. It’s been true of beer commercials that objectify women for male audiences; the converse is only to be expected when the target demographic have paired X chromosomes.

Axe commercials are unusual in that while the product is aimed squarely at men – and the appeal made in an essentially masculine syntax – the covert message is cartoonishly misandrist.

For example, an early ad for Axe deoderant implies that getting accosted violently by women is not only acceptable, but a desirable outcome for most guys. Now, you may find this all pretty innocent — after all, we’ve seen this pitch before, and it’s obviously meant as comic hyperbole. Besides, men basically want it, don’t they? What guy wouldn’t prefer sex over masturbation, even at the point of coercion? But the Axe ad goes beyond the usual tepid cliché, invoking tropes of criminal violence such as line-ups and mugshots, so there’s no ambiguity: they mean sexual assault.

Another ad, for Axe hair products, suggests that public humiliation at the hands of angry hairstylists is only justice, if girls don’t approve of your hair. You wouldn’t want this to happen, so “get girl-approved hair.” (Newer versions of this ad substitute angry hairstylists with cooing, sexy hairstylists; still forceful, but now it’s friendly force, and their unfashionable subject laps it up like a bemused Spaniel terrier. I’m not exaggerating.)

Gender theorist Warren Farrell wrote in the 70’s about mens’ pathological identification as “success objects.” In his view, institutional power uses gender roles to control both sexes; in particular, controlling men by objectifying them as material providers for others. Axe disagrees. The world they depict, for all its decorative machismo, is institutionally yonocentric; female sexuality, in particular, is its moral center. Men are at womens’ disposal, and it’s your choice whether they rape you or mark you for social contempt on account of your hair. That this patently isn’t the case, that Axe are only focusing a view held by their target demographic — are not excuses.

Lest you feel any incidental sympathy for that demographic, though, consider the (apparently successful) ad for a loofah that Axe rebrand a “shower tool.” The commercial implies that a properly manly shower is like the treatment a car receives at a body shop. Never mind the ludicrous suggestion that exfoliating is analogous to detail work; what’s despicable is the idea that on the one hand, gender ought to be a code of honor and shame (in which eating vegetables is a shameful admission of failure) but on the other, totally mutable to such superfices as color scheme and choice of metaphor. This, more than any of Axe’s other ludicrous suggestions, reveals serious bullshit in gender as the consumer unconscious conceives it.