Protein World: Are You Beach Body Ready?

Original Advertisement

The original advertisement above was a controversial campaign from the company Protein World for their new weight loss protein line. When you google this ad, the first thing you notice is all the media coverage and backlash online and on social media. Protein World is a company that makes and sells protein to both men and women, hoping to revolutionize protein and make it cool and hip for young people to consume. However, as trendy as this company is trying to be, this advertisement was completely out of touch and not well received. The original advertisement depicts a young, attractive, slim girl in a bikini who appears to represent the ideal female body based on the caption “are you beach body ready?”. This ad seemed to target the popular belief that one has to lose weight before summer so that they can feel confident and attractive when wearing revealing clothes at the beach. Despite the recently trending phrase “every body is a beach body”, the company chose to use a young woman with a near perfect physique to shame women who do not look this way, into thinking that they must reduce their food intake and lose some weight in order to go to the beach.

If the giant caption was not enough, the fine print below it explains the ways in which these products will work to help you attain your beach body. It works by replacing two meals a day, from an already restrictive calorie diet, with a protein shake. Not only does this ad promote an idealized body, but it also promotes unhealthy ways to attain it. The promotion of a protein shake in itself is not inherently wrong; however, suggesting that restricting your calorie intake and replacing meals with protein all in attempts to get skinny enough to wear a bikini at the beach, sends a negative message to all women who do not look like this model. Should this really be the standard of beauty? If so, it is leaving the majority of women out.

Jammed Advertisement

In my recreated, jammed version of this advertisement, I wanted to emphasize the blatant body shaming that surrounds the concept of being “beach body ready” and the Protein World’s ill-advised steps to achieving this unrealistic look. The text itself was already so shocking that it only took a slight change of words to make the ad’s message clearer. Rather than keeping the caption a question, I rephrased it in a way that more clearly stated what the question really meant. By asking “are you beach body ready?” the advertisement implies that you need to look a certain way in order to go to the beach; more particularly, you need to look like the model in the ad. Therefore, I altered the text to read “the only body you should see at the beach”, to more clearly demonstrate the shaming nature of the ad and the beauty standard they so clearly promote.

I also added instructions that were more straight forward regarding how these products can be used to aid in weight loss. Their fine print reads “substituting two daily meals of an energy restricted diet with a meal replacement, contributes to weight loss”. Even though this already sounds alarming, I wanted to make it clearer what it was exactly that consumers would be doing with these products to achieve this look. So I rephrased the subtitle as “replace your meals with protein powder – it will help you lose weight”. This more clearly explains what are consumers are supposed to do and what their philosophy for weight loss truly is: calorie restriction on top of an already “energy restricted diet”. To be even more detailed, I decided to change their slogan under their company name from Protein World: Pure Performance” to “Protein World: Pure Body Shaming”. I thought this slogan more accurately related to the ad, since this advertisement was not created to promote better performance in the gym, but rather promote an idealized body and shame women into buying products to help them get it.

References:

Advertising/Protein World. (n.d.). Not Another Design Agency. Retrieved February 12^th, 2020,      from http://www.notanotherdesignagency.co.uk/advertising/advertising-proteinworld

About Us. (2019). Protein World. Retrieved February 14^th, 2020, from https://proteinworld.com/pages/about-us