shots 159: W is for Women

Reflecting on 25 years of women in advertising throws up many tricky questions – why are only 25 per cent of creatives in the UK female? If portrayals of women in ads have evolved from just housewives or hot honeys to more diverse visions, why do babes still pout from billboards and how real are the ‘real women’? Carol Cooper looks for the pimply truth beneath the airbrushing

“Why do gentlemen prefer blondes?” poses a voiceover in Budweiser’s Why Ask Why? campaign 25 years ago. A flaxen-haired floozie in a black minidress pouts at the camera, which then lingers over her pert buttocks before the answer appears – “Dumb question.” The ad, from DDB Needham Worldwide, went on to present another stereotype – that tiresome accessory ‘the girlfriend’ – as an irritating nag that any chap would readily replace with a cold beer.

This was 1990, 30 years on from the women’s rights revolution, so there were rightly complaints of sexism. Subsequent spots in the Budweiser campaign were presented more from a woman’s point of view (albeit largely showing male stereotypes – idiots and brutes). Good. So, a lesson learnt then. No more sexist ads. Oh, hang on… In 1992, an 18-year-old stick-thin Kate Moss in nowt but her knickers wafts onto billboards, straddling Mark Wahlberg and selling Calvin Klein pants and heroin chic – not much empowerment there. In 1997, a Pepsi spot sees a lad’s dream of being “a soap-on-a-rope in Claudia Schiffer’s shower” come true: Claudia, (blonde) hair flowing and breasts a-jiggle, approaches the shower in slo-mo to Tom Jones singing She’s A Lady. Orgasmically, she loosens her gown; the lad, his face weirdly photo-montaged onto the soap, can hardly contain himself, but then – the horror – a chubby woman pips Claudia to the shower, disrobes and starts scrubbing herself with the soap/bloke who screams in disgust. The subtext – fat girls are revolting, they’re not the ladies Tom’s singing about.

In the Noughties, things are looking up. We still have women in pants but they’re larger pants, for larger women, courtesy of Dove’s Real Beauty print ads launched by O&M London in 2004. Though the women are flatteringly shot and cellulite free, the ad’s a gamechanger. “Ogilvy’s iconic campaign started a very important dialogue about the force of empowering, women-focussed advertising.

Since then there has definitely been a slow but growing movement to be more aware of the way we’re speaking to women and representing them in advertising,” says Laurel Stark Akman, associate creative director at Razorfish San Francisco and chief social advocate of The 3% Conference, the industry pressure group aiming to increase the number of female creative directors. So has the trend continued in the right direction? “Twenty five years ago, we started to see more variety in how ads represented women, but it was still very much from a male gaze,” says Laura Jordan Bambach, creative partner at agency Mr President. “Fast forward to 2015 and we have a range of how women are portrayed. There’s still plenty of objectification that goes on, but women are also being spoken to with respect, understanding and on female terms for the first time.”

Droga5’s David Droga  says: “Thankfully, women are no longer portrayed as just happy housewives and excitable shoppers in ads. The better campaigns are able to tap into the more dynamic, emotive and cerebral dimensions of a female audience rather than just the feminine wrapping paper that was pushed out for so long.”

Sex (or is it sexism?) still sells

Certainly debate is raging. In February, the UK’s House of Commons hosted a WACL (Women in Advertising and Communications London) debate proposing the motion “This house believes the portrayal of women in advertising in 2015 lags behind reality.” Helen Weisinger, managing partner of agencies HeyHuman and Brave, was present and reports that “An overwhelming majority of the audience, which incidentally wasn’t just women, felt that it does lag behind reality.”

This year also saw the launch of the Cannes Glass Lion to promote gender equality. Though Corinna Falusi, O&M New York’s new CCO would have liked this to come sooner, “I felt this initiative from Cannes came very late. The ADC started the 50/50 initiative years ago. However, incentives tend to work better than deterrents. If people want to waste everyone’s time with misogynistic work they’ll just have to accept that they’ll miss out come award season.”

Better late than never, though, and the Glass Lion jury president, advertising consultant and founder of IfWeRanTheWorld and MakeLoveNotPorn, Cindy Gallop (profiled in shots 157) was thrilled with the results, especially Grand Prix winner, BBDO India’s Touch The Pickle, for Whisper sanitary products, which addresses the stigma surrounding menstruation. “This is a worldwide issue, but that campaign was launched into one of the most conservative marketplaces in the world. Which is what also made it so extraordinary,” says Gallop.

Other Glass Lion winners included Sport England’s This Girl Can – more women in pants, but this time they’re sports pants and these are real real women, a diverse range exhibiting their strength, determination, humour and, crucially, their cellulite.

The ongoing Real Beauty campaign also picked up a Glass Lion and continues to provoke debate. “Ten years on and it’s still being copied. It is the new standard,” says Falusi. But should part of that debate be asking why women need to feel beautiful? How far does this need preoccupy men? “Exactly,” says Jordan Bambach, “[Dove is ] a beauty brand and celebrating that all women are beautiful is spot on, but it all feels like yet another pressure now.

What we need are more representations of women from a women’s perspective, and a normalisation of ‘normal’. Dove made a huge impact originally, though I think that as the campaign has moved on, there’s a feeling that making women feel guilty about not believing they’re beautiful enough is not necessarily the right thing.”

At least it’s not definitely the wrong thing, such as the poster for slimming pill pusher Protein World, which featured a busty blonde in a teeny bikini and the line, ‘Are you beach body ready?’ Though the ASA ruled the ad was not offensive or irresponsible (though it eventually banned the ad for its health claims) it received 378 complaints that the poster implied other body shapes were inferior.

Rebecca Field from eating disorders charity Beat said, “While we recognise advertising and the media cannot cause eating disorders, we are aware how toxic images can be to an individual.” In 2012, after an online campaign against it garnered 11,000 signatures, the ASA did ban Ryanair’s print ad teaming female flight attendants wearing skimpy undies and porn-star pouts with the line ‘Red hot fares… and crew’. Last December, the ASA banned VIP’s similarly outdated spot showing a sultry vamp talking dirty about getting jiggy with an e-cig. However, the ad was not banned for demeaning women, but for glamorising smoking.

The ASA may not be as proactive as we’d like over such “toxic images” but at least digital democracy can be effective. “The advent of social media has really helped push our awareness as a society – and an industry – in the right direction,” says Stark Akman. “Sexist advertising gets skewered now, immediately and publicly – and those brands can choose to respond. It’s given consumers a voice – and the ability to influence our creative work in impactful ways.”

However, there are gains and losses, for social media has also become a platform for misogyny, but Gallop feels that this is no bad thing. “By exposing to a much wider gaze how very toxic that all is, it’s enabling lots of other people, men included, to counter it. It brings it to the surface, which is far, far better than the way it’s been allowed to go on for decades, under the surface and actively holding women back.”

Conflicting images and a cacophony of double speak

While overt misogyny and sexism can be hauled out of the shadows and condemned, an issue with today’s advertising is where insidious, subliminal sexism still lurks. Stark Akman worries about “ads that quietly feed into gender stereotypes, like the 2014 VW Super Bowl spot Wings [‘Every time a Volkswagen hits 100,000 miles a German engineer gets his wings.’

Only one token ‘wingless’ female engineer appeared.] Or the diet ads that reinforce body image issues, like the Special K campaign ‘What will you gain when you lose?’ Because these kinds of ads are seen as less offensive, they also happen more often. And that subtle sexism is a harder thing to battle.”

Advertising that appears to champion strong, empowered women can transmit conflicting counter-messages that reinforce the old order. Recent L’Oréal spots have Helen Mirren stating how older women can be sexy, while paradoxically boasting of hair colour that means “greys [are] gone” and Age Perfect face cream that battles age spots and makes her feel more “like me”, but surely now she’s older (69 actually) “me” has wrinkles and grey hair, so why hide them?

An ad for (L’Oréal-owned) Garnier Nutrisse shampoo sees another female icon, the satirist Tina Fey swapping laughs for lock swinging. You wait for her hallmark irony, but there is none. Fey has never seemed less like herself and both she and Mirren are diminished by these ads. So too are the accomplished women who appear in a recent ad for L’Oréal’s Collection Privée Color Riche Nudes range.

In the extended, behind-the-scenes spot, Julianne Moore, Jane Fonda, Eva Longoria and other high-achievers are having a girly makeover session – all soft-lit, slow-mo and laughing among themselves at secret jokes (like a gaggle of blushing Jane Austen-era bonneted virgins) while talking about how confident and “pretty” their new lippy makes them feel. Try to imagine a male-hunk version of this ad, Jake Gyllenhaal, George Clooney, David Gandy, Idris Elba all giggling at a grooming session saying how their new aftershaves/shiny cufflinks give them confidence, make them feel ‘hunky’?

This ad does not speak of empowerment, more embarrassment – is this really all we have to show after decades of brave women have fought for our freedoms? And what mixed messages are contained in one of the world’s most successful – and once emancipating – taglines “Because we’re worth it”? (See box opposite).

In the mid 19th century only prostitutes wore make-up, thus it was a signifier of availability. Thankfully, now a woman has the freedom to adorn her face and body how she likes without the message being clearly intended that she’s up for it, so from “I’m yours” to “I’m worth it – I do this for me not the male gaze.”

But though a woman may choose to look good ‘for herself’, that look will still be governed by the current definition of beauty. “Being a true feminist means accepting all women have a fundamental right to make their own choices about their appearance,” says Jordan Bambach, “where it gets difficult is when these choices are made for someone or something else. Whether that’s a partner, an industry expectation or a social group.” It’s a complex issue, but for our purposes the point is that women have the right to wear make-up and brands have the right to sell it to them, but the marketing doesn’t have to be shallow, narcissistic or subtly sexist.

Take Clinique’s recent web film Read My Lips, which was made in partnership with the-pool.com, an online mag “for busy women”, and produced by digital agency Swhype. This has a diverse range of women, including best-selling author Kate Mosse, entrepreneur chef Thomasina Miers and broadcaster Lauren Laverne, reading quotes from songs and literature that inspire them. They look and sound like intelligent individuals rather than vacuous numpties.

Of course our selfie-mongering, image-obsessed culture increasingly affects men too, as the boom in male-grooming products shows, but while conventional good looks boost the prospects of both genders, men are still predominantly judged on their substance rather than their surfaces. “Women and men like to look good, there’s nothing wrong with that – the beauty industry is a sector that continues to grow massively,” says Weisinger. “But as Lisa Bloom highlighted in a piece she wrote for Huffington Post recently, the problems for women/girls start at a really young age.

Too often people’s first comment to a little girl is about her looks: ‘Oh, you’re so cute,’ rather than ‘Oh, you’re so smart.’ Teaching girls that their appearance is the first thing you notice tells them that looks are more important than anything.”

The controversial question is: are some women complicit in ongoing gender stereotyping by continuing to buy into ‘the beauty myth’? “Yes, of course,” says Stark Akman, “by buying into these stereotypes or limiting definitions, women help reinforce their relevance. But as leaders in the media industry, it’s our job to take responsibility for our role in perpetuating these harmful stereotypes.

We need to make the media world a safer place for women and girls to be seen and heard as multi-dimensional beings who are more than just our ability to fit into mandated ideals of femininity and beauty.” Zoe Cassavetes, features and commercials director with Little Minx, feels that women do continue to subject themselves to “the pressure to be thin, to have no wrinkles, perfect hair… to embody perfection”.

Falusi is uncomfortable with the charge of complicity, “We tend to find all kinds of problems with things that women are into. It’s unfair to blame oppressive social structures on mascara choices, or someone’s fashion interest.” While Gallop is vociferous that the problem comes from male dominance rather than female submission,  “I have a violent objection to people, women included, who go, ‘We need to be more confident, we need to put ourselves forward, to lean in more.’ Fuck that.”

Gallop asserts that stereotypical images of women in advertising will cease when more women are making the ads than men, “When we have gender equality at the top of every agency, holding company and department, but especially the creative departments, not only will we see better, more authentic, realistic, non-stereotyped depictions of women, we will also see non-stereotypical depictions of men.” Weisinger agrees and on slamming Ryanair and VIP’s sexist advertising says, “Created by women, for women? I don’t think so. Therein lies half the problem.”

Unmaternal monsters and bossy bosses

So how close are we to achieving gender equality in the ad industry? There have been some gains: the first half of this year saw six women take chief creative positions at FCB, Y&R, W+K, O&M and Wunderman. DDB launched the Better By Half initiative, which is aiming to have a 50/50 gender split in its creative leaders within five years.

Awards shows are making an effort too, with the ADC and the Clios now insisting on an equal male/female ratio in their juries. A third of Cannes Lions’ jury presidents were female this year. But with female creative directors still only numbering 11 per cent in the US, progress can hardly be said to be galloping apace. Kate Robertson, Havas Worldwide global president, speaking at a Cosmopolitan conference this spring said: “There are not enough women in senior positions in advertising.

Women are not being paid enough, or promoted enough and mostly we are treated appallingly.” Agency Droga5 is trying to address the issue. “There has certainly been a positive progression but clearly not enough,” says David Droga. “We’ve more female department heads across our agency than male, however we still have fewer female creative directors than I would like to see.”

One of the major obstacles to women’s advancement is the working mum issue. Falusi says: “With its unpredictable hours, advertising is not very parent friendly. One of the hardest things I’ve done in my career was adjusting my work life to accommodate my private life after I had a child. But by US standards O&M New York has good parental leave and flexitime for both men and women.”

So the barriers and stigma around part-time work need to be removed for both sexes. We need to strive for a situation where, if a male creative misses a pitch or board meeting because little Timmy’s got runny poo, or Cassandra’s playing triangle in the school play, nobody bats an eyelid.

At present, however, it’s still more likely that Timmy’s mum will prioritise a poo- or school-based issue over work (or drive herself mad trying to manage both), lest she feels like, and is possibly seen as, an unmaternal monster. Today’s modern dad needs also to be honestly content to take his turn staying home re-reading The Hungry Caterpillar to a tiny tyrannical bedtime refusenik while it’s mum who’s away downing rosé on the Croisette.

Stark Akman says flexible hours and remote working should be achievable. “There’s this unspoken assumption in advertising that working late is necessary to do great work – not only is this a ridiculous notion, it also discourages talented female – and male – creatives who also happen to be parents.” HeyHuman’s Weisinger says agencies she’s worked for have been supportive: “TBWA hired me as a pregnant woman.

Fallon hired me knowing that I was planning more children and HeyHuman accommodated a daily late-morning start so I can take my three kids to school. But part of that was because I was honest about my needs before they hired me. Too often I think people approach it in the wrong way – it’s not about throwing out legal babble and stating rights, but having an honest conversation about how can we manage this in a way that works for both sides.”

Agencies might be moving in the right direction, but what about elsewhere in the industry? Earlier this year Somesuch London’s Sally Campbell bemoaned the lack of female directors in the industry to shots. “The bee in my bonnet is why do women not return from maternity leave? It’s an inflexible industry as far as hours and weekends go, so for a mother there is a lot of heartache and guilt associated with it.”

Some might argue that the predominantly male-dominated ad industry doesn’t wish to change. Falusi notes that: “Change only happens when people are affected by a particular problem and force change. When conditions for women in advertising get better, it won’t be because male CEOs decide to be nice to women out of the goodness of their hearts.”

Another barrier to female advancement, in all sectors, is something Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg highlights in her much debated 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, that is the research exposing how “success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women.

When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.” This unconscious bias against successful women is gradually getting discussed. The website banbossy.com states: “When a little boy asserts himself, he’s called a ‘leader’. Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded ‘bossy’, discouraging girls from asserting themselves – a trend that continues into adulthood.”

Jordan Bambach says: “There’s a huge, hard-to-spot, malevolence against successful women in culture that we’re just going to have to get through, by calling it out, questioning what we see and hear and speaking up against it. Not just women, but all enlightened souls.”

So how have the women I interviewed succeeded despite such barriers? “You’ve got to not worry what anyone thinks about you and your ideas. The less you care and the more you see your point of view as valid (and express it openly – something often harder for women because of how we’ve been brought up to please others) the easier it gets to succeed,” says Jordan Bambach. Weisinger says, “Yes, I’ve encountered hurdles and sexual harassment in my time at work and yes, at times I’ve had to be outspoken but, as I learned from a young age, you have to find your own way, your own style and you have to fight your own battles.

That’s a life lesson, not a gender specific one.” Cassavetes acknowledges the struggle but is optimistic about the future, “Hopefully, the new generation of filmmakers will be more advanced than us and not have to think about gender equality. It’s a new world for them. Kids today are not so obsessed with my generation’s concerns.” Cindy Gallop is also optimistic: “We’re marching ahead, we need to take away what we have learned and act on it and make what The 3% Conference stands for happen. One day, we’ll be The 50% Conference.”

Gallop points out that having a higher ratio of female creatives making women-friendly ads also makes sound business sense: “Firstly, because women are the buyers, the primary purchasers in every sector, and the primary influencers of purchases in every sector, including sectors that were traditionally thought to be male. In the US, more women now hold driving licences than men and 53 per cent of all new car purchasers are women.

Yet who is the automotive industry still targeting their advertising and their product design at? Secondly,” she goes on, “women share the shit out of everything. We are the chatters, the talkers, the recommenders, the advocates. I say to brands that think their target audience is men, ‘talk to women’, because women will influence men more than men will influence other men.”

Shock horror! Flaw spotted on Flawless singer’s skin

Speaking at 2013’s 3% Conference, Gallop asserted that everyone, men and women, undertaking ‘micro-actions’ will cumulatively add up to a macro change. These actions include ways of drawing attention to bias. Stark Akman summarises: “Speak up! Call out bias when you see it. Ask: ‘Did you notice we only have men speaking on this panel?’, ‘Did you notice there’s only one woman involved in this discussion?’, ‘Did you notice the recruiters are primarily sending us male candidates?’”

Such micro-actions not only need to be taken by ad industry workers but other role models too. Though it was heartening to see teen girls’ icon Beyoncé contribute to the banbossy website with her video ‘I’m not bossy, I’m the boss’, it would have been cool if she’d spoken up when a bunch of unretouched pics of her from a 2013 L’Oréal photo shoot revealed… gasp… a few pimples. This prompted the usual Twittersphere twattery with shocked fans claiming “The pics must be faked!”

Beyoncé said nothing. So what did that silence convey? That today’s empowered woman must have flawless skin? The teen girl with acne asks, “I’ll never be like you Bey, I’ll never be the boss? Cos I’m not worth it?” Beyoncé could have ’fessed up, “Yes, I’m just like you, I’ve got a couple of spots, but I still succeeded.”

Advertising’s current clamour of confusing missives needs to be replaced with clearer communiqués about what it is to be a woman – cellulite, pimples and all. A diverse range of creatives need to be directing marketing that sells to women without demeaning them.

Consider again the Clinique film. Rather than mixed messages, the film conveys a double meaning in the title Read My Lips – ‘Look at my flattering lippy, but also listen to me, I have something to say worth listening to.’ This should surely be the mantra of the modern woman everywhere – especially in agency boardrooms.