ORIGINAL AD:

The advertisement I chose to do is from a footwear and apparel company, Redtape. This ad clearly displays a misogynistic view of women. The marketing scheme used in this advertisement is insinuating a man’s fantasy; to have multiple women in bikinis swimming. The brand is trying to say that if you wear our shoes you are living your fantasy. This advertisement is very offensive to women as it objectifies women with three ladies in their bikinis swimming in a water tank. The product the company is trying to sell are the shoes, which are front and centre. The man is looking up as if he was dreaming about his fantasy.

Advertisements draw upon people’s emotions and thought processes. If you use or wear the product in the ad, you will look or be just like the model in the ad. In this case, if you wear these shoes, you too can get these women in bikinis. The women shown in this ad are given little self worth and are objectified as sexual beings. They are skinny, have a light skin tone, and are scantily dressed. They are in a water tank swimming trying to get the attention of the male model.

Clearly, the target audience and consumers of the footwear product is men. This advertisement is very offensive to me as it sexualizes women and I am a woman. This shows how our society views women and perpetuates this idea that you can buy a product and easily get a woman or that women will flock to you. It also shows how women are supposed to look by only having slender women in the advertisement. This advertisement gives the wrong impression, especially to the young men of today. Consumers (males) look at the ad and immediately put themselves in that man’s position of living your fantasy, which involves sexualizing and objectifying women.

MY JAMMED AD:

I changed the advertisement in a few ways in order to change the view of women being objectified and sexualized. I changed the advertisements slogan of “live your fantasy” into “live in reality”. Company marketing strategies try and make the consumer believe that if they buy their product they will look like the model in their advertisements. In this case the man in the photograph is living his fantasy by wearing the brand Redtape shoes.

I changed the slogan because the idea of living your fantasy by wearing a product is simply untrue. Also, his fantasy is undoubtedly misogynistic and clearly sexualizes women. I added thought bubbles to the women to show how they truly felt. Although in the original ad the women look like they are grabbing his attention, the facial expression they give work well with the thought bubbles that I included. If you look at them in a different perspective they look as though they want help and want out of the tank. The left female’s thought bubble says “I am not an object for a man” and the second female’s thought bubble states “I’m drowning in your misogyny”. Both thought processes the women portray are revealing the truth about what the image displays.

I aspired to invoke a sense of reality and truth; that the fantasy the product is claiming to give a man is a hoax and an illusion. Life does not just give you women if you wear a certain brand of shoe. Rather, women are sick of being objectified and seen as something a man can control. The company Redtape footwear and apparel tries to appeal to a man’s ego of desire. The stereotype that women are less than a men is a value that is, unfortunately, instilled in our younger generation with advertisements like this. Sadly, this brand has many other misogynistic ads objectifying and sexualizing women.

(https://adcatalogue.wordpress.com/tag/advert-for-red-tape/)