Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 18, 1993 TAG: 9307140462
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JEFFRY SCOTT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Seinfeld" actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus gets "caught" by the announcer in a new Clairol Nice 'N Easy commercial and confesses she does, indeed, dye her hair.
"I wouldn't change this color for anything," the actress says breathlessly, leaning toward the camera to confess. "It's 121, natural, deep brown."
In the advertising industry this kind of twist on something once sacred - a woman's right to dye her hair in secret - is known as a "wink." It's also a seismic event, the latest in Madison Avenue's on-again, off-again effort to portray women less like stereotypes and more like human beings.
Other real-life portrayals of women are popping up all over the TV landscape and in newspapers and magazines:
A Saturn automobile campaign casts women in the role of decision-maker, instead of the comforter who tags along with Dad or hubby to nod when he makes his choice.
A BellSouth campaign for its ESSX phone systems features women, instead of men, running their own company.
A Secret deodorant commercial features a husband wishing his wife luck as she marches out the door to quit her job and start her own business.
What's spurring the change?
A number of things, but mainly women's buying power and the gradual emergence of females at the top of some of the world's biggest advertising agencies.
A business that for most of the 20th century has been the sport and sanctum of males is finally giving women the vote.
"Women have changed, and therefore ads have changed," says Velva Richey-Rankin, a creative director at giant New York ad agency Ogilvy & Mather.
"The increasingly intelligent and relevant way women are being portrayed today, I think the force of that is coming from the consumer."
Marketers simply can no longer afford to communicate with women in the belittling language of stereotypes, according to Jagdish Sheth, a professor of marketing at Atlanta's Emory University. Women pack too much economic clout.
Since the 1950s, the number of women earning money outside of the home has increased from 10 percent to about 55 percent, and it will be 65 percent by the end of the decade, says Sheth. And women want to be accorded the same respect that advertisers generally have accorded men.
"The woman is the buyer, she is no longer just the consumer," says Sheth. "Marketers are appealing to [women] less on sex appeal and more on value appeal because [women] are spending money out of their own pocket."
Marketers have long known that women make between 80 percent and 85 percent of household purchases. The assumption, however, was that men made the decisions on most big-ticket items. That's no longer the case.
Today, women buy 50 percent of the automobiles and life insurance, make 45 percent of car rentals and own 42 percent of the stock in this country, according to Mediamark Research Inc.
When BellSouth airs the commercial later in July that features women running a small business, it's not because the company is crusading against sex stereotypes. It just doesn't want to ignore most of its customers.
"More than 50 percent of all [new business] start-ups are by women," says Carol Niemi, who wrote the commercial for BellSouth's Atlanta advertising agency, Tucker Wayne Luckie & Co. Niemi is one of the city's high-ranking female creative directors.
Cheryl Heller, a creative director with New York agency Frankfurt Gips Balkind, says "There aren't as many babes in beer commercials anymore. Is that because there are more women creating ads? Or is that because it's a cliche that, all of a sudden, is passe?"
Perhaps more conflicting to women in the ad business is the uncomfortable feeling that - for whatever successes they can claim - they're still only guests at the country club.
In a survey of 2,000 men and women in communications released in June by Advertising Women of New York, 65 percent of women respondents said they believe the old boys network still exists and still limits their career advancement, especially in advertising.
Louise McNamee, a partner in New York agency Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer, sees changes in the ads and in the industry.
She says they're "probably not as rapid as we would like to see it," but it's steady progress. "All of us remember, maybe painfully, the stereotypical housewife of the '70s and the equally stereotypical superwoman of the '80s. We're beginning to see women treated as people in advertising."
She concedes that the ads may be progressing faster than women's careers in the business - "I don't see as many women high up in advertising as I would like" - but says that's "less the result of discrimination than it is the recession. You've seen less movement in the business."
Carol Moog, head of the Philadelphia advertising consulting firm Creative Focus and a consumer psychologist, is skeptical that there's been much advancement in the ads.
Cosmetics companies and fashion apparel companies are still foisting unreal images on women, Moog said. "There are these models with these little anorexic-like waists and they're saying be yourself. Come on, who weighs 90 pounds? It's Twiggy. No breasts, no muscle, no power."
Marilyn Bane, the senior vice president of consumer marketing for Maidenform, says, "We don't really believe we're in the bra business, or even the fashion business. We believe we're in the business of connecting with women."
Through the years, Maidenform has tried to reflect the condition of womanhood in its ads. The 20-year "I Dreamed" campaign ("I dreamed I barged down the Nile in my Maidenform Bra") was addressed to women who returned to become homemakers after working in the factories during World War II.
A 1980s commercial showed women in old-fashioned corsets, while the announcer intoned: "Isn't it nice to live in a time when women aren't being pushed around so much anymore?"
Last fall, Maidenform ran a $6 million TV campaign in the three weeks leading up to the presidential election, setting the tone, says Bane, for its advertising in the '90s. Commercials showed women's torsos pinned with campaign buttons. The announcer said: "If you've got something to say, now's the time to get it off your chest."
by CNB