Why are classic boring advertisements always aimed at women?

Have you ever noticed how these days the quality of advertising has improved?

The commercial break often is more entertaining than the TV-shows that are interrupted by them. It’s because marketers feel like people have become so overexposed to advertising that people have become extremely hard to influence.

To respond to this marketers have adopted a new vision on their customers. They no longer see their customers as people that need to buy their products. They see their customers as people that need to enjoy their brand and products. They try to make as intelligent, original and entertaining advertising as they can in order to influence their potential customers.

Have you ever noticed how about 95% of this new original, creative and entertaining advertising is directed to men (or both men and women)?

Have you ever noticed how about 95% of the old classic boring advertising is directed at women?

Marketing actions directed to women are usually clearly made by marketers that seem to assume that their customers are a brainless herd that needs to be directed in the right direction, their direction.

It often excels in a lack of originality. If you’ve seen one advertisement for washing products you’ve seen them all. If it’s something you haven’t seen a zillion times before, it usually is because it wants to give you something new to be insecure about. ‘You may not smell how much your house stinks, but other people do.’ ‘Have you ever thought about how ugly your armpits are?’

On top of that advertisements that are aimed at women, usually have a woman that you are supposed to want to be. In Italy where everybody has brown hair, this woman you should aspire, usually is a blonde. In Asia, Africa and Latin-America she usually is fair-skinned. So the message of these advertisements is: ‘you may not ever be able to be blonde like me, but you do can have a house that smells like mine’ or ‘you won’t ever be white like me, but you do can get lovely armpits like mine.’ One of the few examples of a diverse advertising campaign is the Ikea-catalog, Ikea, coming from the country with all the natural blondes.

Advertising directed at women often assumes women are stupid. It encourages old insecurities and creates new ones. The marketing industry is not dominated by men. There are nearly just as many men as women in it. In companies aimed at women there usually are more women than men working in the marketing department.

So the problem isn’t that men use marketing to make women feel down so they can more easily suppress them. The problem is that there are too many women and men in the marketing industry that see (other) women as idiots. The problem is that there aren’t enough women and men that are brave enough to create a marketing strategy aimed at making women enjoy their brand.

What disappoints me about 'feminists'

When you start a new blog, you start thinking about in what frame it fits in. In the beginning I felt like it fits in the feminist frame and than I realised that the reason I feel disappointed in ‘feminism’, is that blogs like mine call themselves feminist blogs.

Back in the days when I wore pink skirts because I was proud of being a girl, I thought that being a feminist would mean that you cared about women’s rights. As I grew older, I started to get the feeling that feminists were women that had an opinion on how women should act.

One ‘feminist’ would talk about how women should act more like men and then another ‘feminist’ would talk on how women should act less like men. Another one would talk about how women should be sexier, because it would be empowering and than another one would talk about how women should avoid being sex objects.

I feel like they are all wrong. It are all just women telling women how to behave and it’s just as wrong as men telling women what to do. Women that feel like they are so morally superior that they can judge other women’s actions should realise that what they are doing is not a form of feminism. It’s a form of gossip.

‘Feminists’ that go on and on about whether or not women should be pretty and sexy or not are in my opinion the worst. Do they realise they think of women the same way as sexist men? Sexist men also only care about how beautiful or sexy a woman is.

Lastly I feel like these days, people that defend women’s rights are called human right activists instead of feminists. And I guess that means progress. It means women’s rights are seen as people’s rights.

Be a man. Are clothes that flatter a woman's body bad?

I really don’t understand why clothes that are not flattering for a woman’s body are often called ‘intelligent’ design, while clothes that emphasize a woman’s femininity are called vulgar or are called clothes for women that don’t understand that those clothes come from an era where they had no rights.

I find it a reflection of where feminism failed, when they said that women had the same rights as men and that women had the right to do the things men do, some feminists told women that in order to acquire these same rights that they should act more like men. There is a real fine line between telling women to act like men and between telling women that there is something wrong with being a woman.

As much as I feel like women have the right to act like men, if they feel that way, I feel like when a woman feels like acting like a woman, by dressing like one for example, it doesn’t mean that she’s doing that to please men. It doesn’t mean that she’s naïve or cheap. It means she likes dressing like a woman.

When you call clothes that make a woman look more like a man ‘intelligent’ and clothes that emphasize a woman’s body ‘vulgar’ or ‘naïve,’ you’re basically saying that men look more intelligent than women.