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Original Ad and Problem

The ad I chose to jam for this assignment is an Instagram ad for a “detox tea” from a company called Flat Tummy Co. The ad depicts an image of a tea package with a millennial pink background, and a cutesy font claiming that this “two step detox” will boost your energy and metabolism, flatten your stomach, and otherwise improve your life. If you were to click on the ad, you would be taken to a web page advertising “Tummy Makeover Flat Tummy Tea,” with a link directing you to shop either shakes or teas. The tea in the advertisement is sold at $98 for an 8-week supply – over $10 per week for a daily tea bag.

There are many issues with this Flat Tummy Co Instagram ad. First, there is the obvious issue of advertising an overpriced, unregulated product that is not approved by the FDA (as stated in small print at the bottom of the company’s website) and promising that it will flatten one’s stomach, despite the fact that a completely flat stomach is not an achievable goal for anyone due to the presence of internal organs. Additionally, the ad is clearly targeted at women, especially young women, as inferred from the playful fonts and pastel pink color scheme. On the tea package pictured in the ad, there are 2 smiling women who are presumably overjoyed about the tea that has made their stomachs flat. Both are young and conventionally attractive. The Instagram page for the company sells the same ideal as the ad: all of the people pictured are young, attractive women, and not a single man is included. The website itself is just as gendered: the images are pink, cute, and only depict women. The language frequently refers to the reader as “Babe” and makes statements such as “Most girls say it tastes really good!” Looking at the ad itself, one does not even need to head to the website to see the message that the ad conveys: weight loss is for women, the best bodies are thin, and expensive products are the way to achieve this.

Jammed Ad and Philosophy

When redoing this ad, my aim was to remove the deceptive messaging and pleasantries, and replace them with blunt versions of the messages that the ad truly conveys. The largest text in the ad, which originally read “Two-Step Detox,” I replaced with the words “Your Body Is Bad.” This is the central message upon which the company relies in order to create a market for their product. Placing their entire company’s philosophy upon the impossible ideal of having a flat stomach plants the seeds of dissatisfaction and self hate that are needed to sell their ineffective products for exorbitant amounts of money. Below the image of the tea package, where the original ad listed four unsupported, unresearched “benefits” of the product, I added my own list of statements, including the fact that the products are not approved by the FDA, the “de-bloating” effect of the tea is achieved by laxatives, and the company is not allowed to advertise to minors.

This brings me to another important point: I would like to recognize that the reason the company is not allowed to advertise to minors is thanks to the work of Jameela Jamil, an actress and activist who provided the inspiration for the jamming of this ad. Jamil is a passionate advocate against diet culture, and in 2019 she successfully campaigned for Instagram to implement new rules that would prohibit the advertisement of weight loss products and cosmetic procedures to users under 18 years of age. Previously, Jamil has spoken out against Flat Tummy Co itself, after Kim Kardashian promoted the company’s appetite suppressant lollipops to her Instagram following of 173 million. The work of activists such as Jamil is vitally important to dismantling the institutions and ideas promoted by ads such as the one I have shown for this assignment. I hope that my culture jam has helped to subvert some of the implied messages shown in this ad.