Reaction to Codes of Gender

As an advertising major it was hard for me to watch Codes of Gender without having strong feelings against it and getting a little worked up. I view this movie and the book the narrator talked about as biased against advertising. In my opinion if you are not familiar with the advertising world from behind the scenes then you shouldn’t try and dissect if from the outside because you will read things wrong just as these individuals did.

I would like to start off by saying that advertising strategies and the creative implementations are based off of research collected from the public population. Before a campaign is released to the mass population there is secondary research collected from already existing resources, surveys distributed to the public, focus groups for one on one contact with the target as well as concept testing done on an individual basis. After all of this research and feedback is collected the campaign can begin the rest of the process, if they were off target and offended or didn’t reach their intended group of people they start over and if they were on target they proceed with the idea they had.

In reaction to what they said about women being portrayed as submissive, fragile and hopeless, they are reading way too much into it. Women pose the way they do in advertisements because when the target looks at the ad it makes them feel good about themselves, it’s viewed as high fashion not an image of “putting women in their place” as the movie claimed it was doing. As for over the top sexual poses in an ad for say Guess Jeans—they don’t necessarily need to show the jeans because they aren’t trying to sell just another pair of jeans, they are trying to sell you a feeling for the brand and an emotion you want to feel; that way next time you see a pair of Guess jeans you are going to recall this advertisement and part of you is going to feel sexy and you will most likely consider buying those jeans—it may sound stupid to some but like I said before, if it wasn’t working, they wouldn’t do it.

Bottom line what I am trying to say is advertising is the way it is because it is what the people want and if you are not satisfied with an advertisement than you are not the intended target, so ignore it and move on.