Victoria's Secret Angels: The Normalization of Type in Visual Advertising

 

For the most part, the advertising of these past few decades has occupied a very visual space. Print ads, television commercials, billboards - they're all a part of our day-to-day imagery. And I'm interested in how this day-to-day imagery influences our thinking, and in turn, our actions - because even if we're not hyper-aware of the particular ways that the totality of quotidian visual information - or we're not able to link specific images to specific thoughts - I can assure you that the link is still there, and the effect of advertising images is not trivial.

I'm going to use lingerie models to explain this.

Victoria's Secret was started in 1977 by Roy Raymond, who felt embarrassed when buying lingerie for his wife. Victoria's Secret was supposed to be a lingerie retailer that was comfortable for men to shop at, and it expanded from one store and a mail-order catalog to its chain store status today: there are more than 1000 Victoria's Secrets stores in the U.S. alone. But more than that, the models for Victoria's Secret (they're called "angels") are iconic: ask any college girl and they'll most likely be able to recognize at least one Victoria's Secret Angel and maybe tell you a first name as well. The Victoria's Secret annual fashion show (which happened a few weeks ago, coincidentally) is also a big deal. My point is, the image of the Victoria's Secret Model - deployed through mall advertising, online advertising, and mail order catalogs - is pervasive and very affective. And by affective, I mean that these Victoria's Secret ads affect how we think about women's bodies and essentially normalize a certain type of female body.

Of course, this type of female body is only one of many, and I'd say that it doesn't represent the majority of women's bodies. Tall, thin, huge breasts, long legs, blemish-free faces - but somehow, this type has been consecrated as an ideal? Why? I would argue that advertising is a form of normalizing images. Advertising sets standards, advertising affirms certain body types, and advertising gives cultural visibility to certain individuals. This cultural visibility can translate into public approval as well as public desire, and yet, public approval and public desire also feed into what is culturally visible - it's all a bit of a vicious cycle. We see celebrities in advertisements as much as individuals featured in advertisements become celebrities (e.g. the Subway guy who lost a lot of weight?). 

I'm trying to think about how this all happens - and what gives advertising the authority to engage in such a determining process of normalization. It's irresistible in many ways, but also subversive. Women begin to hate their bodies and strive to look like Victoria's Secret Angels - not necessarily questioning where that desire for that Angel body comes from. Accepting the "types" we see in advertising as the standard, as the ideal is certainly blind acceptance, and this blind acceptance limits the acceptance of diversity, of difference, of other types. Because exclusive acceptance of one ideal is the rejection of so many others. 

Advertising has given us a normalized definition of beauty and sexiness, but I think this can be changed by giving increased cultural visibility to a wide array of types and body types. So here's to the possibility of shorter Angels and larger Angels and squat Angels and curvier angels; to the possibility of more black Angels and Asian Angels and Hispanic angels. Advertising is normalizing, so why don't we normalize diversity?

The State of Advertising Address

 Let’s flush out the concept of advertising as it exists today.

In its purest form, advertising is a way to bring visibility to a product or a service. Its ultimate goal is some sort of conversion in which a person decides to buy a product or use a service or watch a particular movie. On a fundamental level, advertising attempts to steer our choices. It presents us with one specific choice which is accompanied by a message, no matter how subliminal, “choose me!”

But the state of advertising today is not merely a means to an end. In fact, I would argue that advertising is an end unto itself—not necessarily purposed as such by its producers and creators, but by its audiences who treat advertisements as products and more specifically, as entertainment. I’ll use myself as an example: as someone who has little to no interest in watching or understanding the game of football, the Superbowl has one main draw for me: the half-time commercials. Millions of dollars are spent every year on these commercials, and the airing of these commercials has become an event unto itself. If an ad is shocking or successful enough, it can even overshadow the “main” event—the football game itself.

Nowadays, we enjoy advertisements like we enjoy TV shows or movies. We pass YouTube links around telling our friends, “Watch this ad. It was hilarious!” When I go to the movies, I am as excited for the movie previews as I am for the movie itself, which is a testament to our affinity for the micro-narratives embedded into advertisements. I’ve been thinking about the psychology behind this advertisement-as-entertainment scheme, and I think advertisements function as short comedy sketches or vignettes that can fulfill our desires for new and interesting narratives without occupying too much of our time and attention. We are a distracted society, after all. But I think advertisements can also function as commentaries on our society in the way that they point out something we know about ourselves but would hesitate to talk about. Advertisements can be self-mocking; they can be absolutely ridiculous; they can be parodic; and they can be poignant. Advertisements as form do not need to conform to a specific genre to be functional or even successful—a fact which gives the producers of these ads room to be creative (I know there are corporations who place limits and constraints around this production, but I’m highlighting the fact that ads have the potential to be creative—not necessarily that all ads are creative). More and more, with the way that we spend so much time online or on YouTube, I think advertisements can begin to occupy an educational and innovative space—a space that would become interdisciplinary and multi-faceted, that would not solely be about a product or service or object but also include other kinds of commentaries and ideas. I see the advertising space right now changing with technology, and I think we will see the transformation of the medium of advertisements into a hybridized vessel that combines selling with other motives. The growth of technology is unpredictable and ever-expansive, and I’m excited to see how advertising will be changed because of it.

Women and Cars

"What are you looking at?"

...

"You're undressing me with your eyes"

This Italian commercial for the Fiat 500 isn't particularly unique or surprising. Sexy women and sexy cars, we've seen it all before. But what strikes me about this ad in particular is that it reinforces an idea that society has constructed around (1) objectifying women in a literal sense and (2) male ownership of females and (3) giving objects a gendered identity.

Let me explain.

When a man becomes extremely attached to an object he owns - this is usually a car or a music instrument - he will (very often) name that object. The object usually takes on a feminine identity - which I'm sure has deeply psychological underpinnings, and speaks to both masculine desire and ego. In this ad, the Fiat 500 - a new and sexy car - becomes a sexualized object because it is equated with this hot, Italian woman. The point is this: the Fiat 500 makes the slightly geeky-looking man weak in the knees just as a woman might. The car, in effect, has the same effect as a woman on a man - and even though that could arguably speak to the role woman as seductress, I'd actually beg to differ that the woman as seductress role here is not empowering but demeaning. There is nothing surprising here, unlike this ad, because the train of thought in this kind of advertising is that it's necessary to play up to men's egos (men own cars like men own women) for men to buy products. It's time that we start breaking down this correlation between women and cars - and women as objects. As sexy as this advertisement may be, let's admit it - it's by no means creative or innovative.

Canadian Club: A View of Masculinity

These ads for Canadian Club are undoubtedly attractive and catchy. The color of the photographs are warm and saturated, the typography is aesthetically pleasing and attention-grabbing, and the message is strong and demanding. What’s interesting about this ad is that the product is at the very end of the message; in other words, it seems to be more of an afterthought than anything else and it is the trail of thought the viewer must follow that gives strength to the product itself. The success of the ad is contingent upon the associations that the viewer gleans from the ad—associations that are superimposed upon the product later: sharp, masculine, smart, and sexy.

In this ad campaign, Canadian Club is relying very explicitly on a narrow and categorical definition of masculinity, a view of heteronormative masculinity that involves sex, fishing, shaving, and cocktails—all of which—for a real man, according to these ads—are effortless. What’s not included in this definition of masculinity? Metrosexuality. Pilates. Moisturizing. Pink cocktails. And certainly not abstinence, says Canadian Club. These are modern buzzwords that Canadian Club relegates to femininity, suggesting that their whisky drink is both classic and masculine—because YOUR dad (also classic and masculine) drank it. That’s “damn right”—your dad—who slept with other girls before your mom, who got two numbers in one night, who went fishing instead of doing pilates—drank whisky cocktails, and they tasted good. So if you want to be as manly as your dad—the manliest hero of them all—do the manly thing and drink some Canadian club.

The aesthetics of these ads command a dreamy nostalgia of an imagined past—because the audience they are addressing must be young—given that the people in these 70s-era photos include “your dad.” This assumes that the viewer has not lived in the 60s or 70s but have parents that did. And despite this constructed fantasy of masculinity and the contrived photos that come along with it, nostalgia is (and may always be) trendy. Nowadays, people fetishize past decades, associating particular aesthetics, bands, fashions, and attitudes with the 20s, the 50s, the 70s, the 90s—you name it. This yearning for a past we never experienced is comforting in the face of accelerating technology, I’m sure—and it’s why we revel in Instagram and Hipstamatic, mobile apps that create sepia-toned and faded photos reminiscent of Polaroids; it’s why we are advocates of vinyl and find vintage fashions novel. And Canadian Club smartly capitalizes on this nostalgia.

Pilates? Metrosexuals? Moisturizing? Pink cocktails? Those are sissy creations of the 21^st century. You really want to be a man? The kind of man who existed in the 70s? (Yeah, those were real men). Well then, you better drink up—because Canadian Club is the way to manhood.

What Happens On Da Laptop, Stays On Da Laptop

As consumers with limited cash to spend, we make choices every day between the thousands of services and products vying for our wallets.  And amid the fray & frenzy, those companies and services that offer security, insurance, or precautionary measures can easily be overshadowed by more tantalizing products.  Buying insurance of any sort seem less urgent than, say, purchasing a new album or a concert ticket, or replacing your empty tube of toothpaste.  You’re not actually getting anything for your money – you’re only paying to avoid things you don’t want.  So a major advertising maneuver for security services is to elaborate (and exaggerate) the damages and disasters that might befall you should you choose to forego their security.  In many respects, companies that deal in burglar alarms or flood insurance have it easier -- they can show frightening images of the concrete disasters that they promise to fend off.  But if you’re a technological security service, such as Norton by Symantec, it’s much more difficult to put a face on the digital villain.  They must figure out how to render technological dangers perceptible to the buying audience -- and how to make those dangers feel not only real, but imminent.

Norton’s 2011 campaign is creative and entertaining, and succeeds in an unlikely way.  Their series of advertisements consist of a yellow background, with different file names printed in simple type across the page – .mp3 files, .mov files and .jpg files.  The entire thrust of the campaign lies in the clever file names, which hint at deeply personal content of some kind – content with sentimental value, historical value, or just potentially embarrassing value, such as "TheMomentSheSaidYes.jpg" (sentimental), “GrandpaDoingTheRunningMan.mov” (familial-sentimental), or “FellAsleepOnTheCouch_AKA_FunWithMagicMarker.jpg” (blackmail-worthy).  These file names, while specific and personal at first glance, are also fundamentally generic – I mean, you may not have a .jpg of yourself with a magic-marker moustache, but instead you might have a .bmp file of that time you passed out on Widener Steps in your Halloween costume.  Norton hopes that you see the file names and grin, because there's a good chance that you have a parallel file somewhere in the labyrinth of your laptop. 

The punchline of the ad comes in the small black print in the bottom left corner of the page: “It’s not just data.  It’s your life.”  And that's the sentiment Norton needs to sell if they want to sell their product.  Norton is marketing aggressively in the intersection of our everyday mediascapes, technoscapes, and terrorscapes­.  The media files that are strangely precious to you (and integral to your identity!) are technological in nature -- and at the same time, they are under threat from menacing technological forces.  By subtly (and, in the tagline, overtly) suggesting that your life and personal history are constituted entirely of data like home movies, pictures, and sound recordings, Norton markets itself as a hugely desirable digital safeguard.  

Sweet, Savory, Spiritual

While waiting for the subway to arrive at Porter Square, I noticed this ad across the platform: it read “Church with Benefits” in large print, with the sub-header: “Practical spirituality served up with complimentary culinary treats. Sweet, savory, spiritual.” Fittingly, I had just come from a church service and was amused but also annoyed by this advertisement. A few things crossed my mind:

(1)  When did churches start advertising themselves? Are they in such a position where they need advertising through commercial means? Are they "keeping" up with the times or is the face of "evangelism" changing? Advertising itself is a money-oriented business - which seems to be (in theory) a counterpoint to the "business" of religion. What I mean by money-oriented business is that advertising is driven by money, you need money to advertise, and you advertise to bring in money—which leads me to my second point.

(2)  If the ultimate end-goal of (most) commercial advertising is to bring in money (through convincing the consumer to buy/use a product or service), then what does that say about the end-goal of this “religious” ad? This ad’s immediate goal is to attract people to the church’s services—but does the medium through which they are attempting to fulfill this goal strengthen the deprecatory church-money connection? Should there be a division between church and commerce akin to the division between church and state? (Also, refer to Matthew 21:12 where Jesus overturns the tables of the money-changers in the temple.)

(3)  The selling point of this ad, for a church, is food. Food? Really? I wonder about the effectiveness of this ad because I’m not sure who their target audience is, and I think it’s necessary for an effective advertisement to understand their viewers. The kind of person who is seeking spirituality might be on the subway, but if they are spiritually “hungry,” will the lure of “culinary treats” be enough to spur him/her on? Or is this ad literally trying to attract people who are physically hungry and looking for food? Which brings me to my fourth point:

(4)  The content of this ad both undermines both the authority of the church and the intelligence of the viewer. In other words, this ad dumbs down spirituality. Perhaps it is appealing to a more primal instinct (the need for food?), but to think that someone who is spiritually curious would attend church to fulfill their primal needs seems, to me at least, to make a mockery of human intelligence and the desire for real spiritual “food.”

What do you think about churches advertising themselves?

When Cigs Are Good for the Soul

'Well the night does funny things inside a man

These old tom-cat feelings you don't understand

Well I turn around to look at you, you light a cigarette,

I wish I had the guts to bum one, but we've never met,

And I hope that I don't fall in love with you.'

-Tom Waits