Sex was once a sales pitch, now advertising resorts to racism
Consumers have the power to stop buying, in protest
FOR A long while sex was the biggest sales pitch. You may remember the advertisements for tyres and cars in the old newspapers and magazines with their bikini-clad models draped over the product.
It was almost like every product needed something to draw the attention of the consumer and a bikini-clad woman was just the ticket. In those days women hardly bought cars, let alone drove them.
It was the man who bought the car for his stay-at-home wife to drop off and fetch the children from school and do a spot of shopping every now and again.
You would now struggle to find such adverts because many things have shifted in society. A strong feminist movement pushed for us to see that these adverts were objectifying women. In other words, women were being portrayed as sex objects and not as human beings.
Advertising agencies changed their advertisements to reflect this change in society but, I would argue, it wasn’t because they were afraid of the feminist backlash.
They changed because their target market changed. More women were buying cars and not just for going shopping or ferrying children to school and back.
Women had buying power and the advertisements changed. Of course, the agencies projected their clients as being sensitive to the changes to society but in reality they were merely following the market.
So what market are the advertisers following in South Africa? Is the market racist? Who has the most disposable income and how do they get these people to part with this money?
In 2001, the parliamentary committee on communications held hearings into racism in the advertising industry. They asked questions such as “what is non-racialism and anti-racism?” and the chair said that “a probable solution could only be arrived at once the industry took cognisance of the fact that it was not immune to racism”.
The Government’s Communication and Information System (GCIS) recommended an advertising and industry indaba, the strengthening of regulatory bodies and “self-regulation by agencies to celebrate diversity in society”.
CJ Moerdyk, a marketing and media consultant and representative of the Advertising Standards Authority, stated that “the submissions placed before the committee were idealistic and reminiscent of the 1960s and the apartheid ideology”.
Regarding racism and its practice in South Africa, he identified three key areas:
The way in which the country’s mass media markets itself and the media research processes their support is unquestionably racist.
The lack of will by the advertising industry to accelerate the development of black people.
White media buyers are forced to resort to racism by having little alternative but to use research tools to select media in which to place advertising.
Moerdyk seemed to imply that racism was a reality in the advertising industry because race was still a reality in South African society.
It’s important to note that these discussions took place in 2001 and I am not sure what has been done since then to address racism in the industry when we have had at least two highlevel incidents involving chain stores such as H&M, and now Clicks – with an advert that had pictures of African hair labelled dry, dull and damaged, while an example of white hair was described as fine and flat.
So it’s a fair question to ask how was H&M “punished” for their racist advertisement in 2018 – a catalogue in which a black boy wore a hoodie bearing the slogan, “coolest monkey in the jungle”.
The EFF protested at their stores and damaged two of them but, beyond that, very little actually happened.
According to the South African Human Rights Commission, the “advert was immediately removed and the offending garments were removed from outlets”. Oldouz Mirzaie, H&M’s country manager in South Africa said: “Our position was and still is very clear: this was a big mistake and we simply got it wrong.”
Essentially, nothing much happened to H&M and certainly not enough to deter Clicks from making the same mistake.
I have a different take on this. The reality is that racism sells.
Let’s look at these incidents more broadly. Most people have forgotten about the reason why H&M was accused of racism, but we still remember the brand.
Creating a public outcry about a brand is good marketing because it pushes the brand deeper into the public psyche. People react on social media and share their indignation, but all they are doing is providing free advertising for the brand.
Nothing happens by accident in advertising because the process is vetted and approved almost every step of the way. Clicks has a lot of data available to them through their store card.
They know exactly who their customers are because this information is collected whenever someone completes an application for a store card. They certainly have a lot more information to inform their advertising.
What will happen to Clicks? Well, a heartfelt apology and some sensitivity training for their staff along the lines of what happened to H&M but not much else.
In the meantime, Clicks will be in angry posts on social media and the EFF will protest and their brand will be more widely known.
And when the fuss is over, people will still remember Clicks but will have forgotten why they remember it.
What, then, is the solution? I think we can take a leaf out of the way the feminists pushed their consumer power to force the companies to take them seriously.
Those who are offended by these advertisements must vote with their buying power and make sure that these advertising agencies and their clients feel their power at the tills. This is the only language they understand.