(almost) always thinking

role reversal

21 September, 2012 at 5:54 pm Leave a comment

I was at a wedding recently and during the evening do I got cornered by someone who had found out I worked in advertising and demanded to know:

“Why do all the ads with a family in them have a confident, in charge woman and a hopeless man?”

I was about to write his comment off to one too many glasses of wedding bubbly until I started thinking about it.  It turns out he has a point:

Philidelphia  go for the ’101 uses’ approach

while BT chose the classic Family option

and Oak Furniture Land fall back on the old ‘he can’t even shop properly!’

You could argue that women tend to be the main decision makers for these kind of products and acknowledging that they sometimes do take the head of household role should in theory appeal to them.  Buts it’s still lazy advertising.  At least we’ve come a long way from these kind of ads:

Entry filed under: advertising, trends. Tags: old ads, reversed, sexist.