We'll fund vaccines and throw in the social stereotypes for free!

[mrissa]

Gmail is not letting me log in; this is annoying, but it says they're trying to fix it.

You know what else is annoying? United Way's print ad campaign. Again, or still. They've got pictures of people saying that they did certain things -- "I pulled 33,000 kittens from burning buildings!" -- and then it says it was through the magic of donating money to United Way. Except it's not 33,000 kittens. It's stuff like -- well, here are the examples I remember:

A bearded, long-haired guy in a leather jacket: helped preschoolers with their social skills
Two middle-aged women: built houses for the poor
(the latest one to spark my wrath) A Hispanic guy with a goatee: helped a bunch of kids get their teeth straightened out

Because everybody knows that those longhair freaky types shouldn't be allowed near children, and girls can't build houses, and Hispanics can't be dentists! Thanks, United Way, for allowing us to pay someone to have humanitarian skills we would lack if we were walking stereotypes!

As I was sitting at a stoplight boggling at a bus that had the one with the Hispanic teeth-straightener on its side, I saw that it had a set of wrenches in the background. So I think the idea was supposed to be, "Mechanics aren't dentists." But it came out, "Them Mexicans ain't dentists, but they'll fix your car up real good!" Oh yah. Much better.

I would like to send -- oh, let's say, all the women from my folks' church's Habitat for Humanity housebuilding team, plus all the Hispanic dentists and orthodontists in the suburb we lived in when we were in California -- after the idiots who came up with this campaign. The leather-jacketed shaggy people, being generally amiable, even-tempered types, can babysit for the housebuilders' and dentists'/orthodontists' kids while they go kick ad agency butt. "United Way: we will play on cheap stereotypes, so give us your money." Great. Thanks. Just what I wanted.

Comments

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

The problem is that they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. If the housebuilders are men, people will want to know why the UW is implying that only men build houses.

Stereotyping is as much in the inference as it is in the implication, and whichever way they lean, someone is going to take it badly.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Except that they didn't have to do the "look at me, how special I am" campaign at all. They could, for instance, show pictures of the houses.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

They could, but people respond better to pictures of people than pictures of things. A picture of a house gets you less bang for your advertising buck.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Then maybe they could come up with a different ad campaign.

Seriously, if it was men, they wouldn't get the response they wanted from the ad, because the ads are very clearly designed to make people say, "How could such a person do such a thing? Ah! Through giving money to United Way!" So if you showed a muscular young man in beat-up work clothes with the caption, "I built 47 houses for the poor," smaller text off to the side: "by giving to United Way," you don't get the presumption of incongruity. There's not really much reason to read the side text at all.

I suspect this is why they're not showing groups of office workers in a cubicle/office setting with captions of "WE did such-and-such": because they think it's less of an attention-grabber. They're probably right. I just reserve the right to dislike how they think people's attention will be grabbed and what they reinforce along the way.