Other PC Specialist ad banned

But there is such a thing as a gaming computer and bog standard home office computer - that's why adverts for Lenovo, Curry's/PC World and Dell all feature a fairly even male/female split, because a fairly even split are buying those machines. This isn't the case for PC Specialist.

There are A LOT of young lads using make-up nowadays (and fair play to them!), but that doesn't stop all the make-up manufactures only featuring female celebrities and supermodels, does it?

 

Gaming, office, irrelevant. A computer, regardless of the user, spec, cost, or intent, is functionally the same device.

Yes there are. Hell, I used to wear black nail polish (Mega goth, innit). Even had an argument with a teacher about it. He was adamant that only girls wore nail polish and that I'd not be allowed back in his classroom again if I wore it again.

Should all companies be forced to have gender neutral adverts? Of course they should. And, given time, I expect they will too. Right now, though, (And rightly so IMO), the focus is on the largest amount of sexism. IE: Sexism directed at women. Because there is a shitload more of that than there is any other.

As mentioned though, I think it's all somewhat kid-gloving it. I don't understand how an advert affects someones sense of self worth sufficiently that it is offensive. I think they're all patronising pap that should be flat out banned unless they state purely facts and show a simple still picture of the item being advertised. But I have been known to have some black and white, arguably extreme, opinions on things.

 

PC Specialust are not saying that only men can buy their computers.

 

Not explicitly - But they were depicting men in a stereotypically male role, and only men. That falls under the first example given in the PDF I linked earlier, I'd reckon;

"An ad that depicts a man with his feet up and family members creating mess around a home while a woman is solely responsible for cleaning up the mess."

It's a demonstrably negative stereotype to imply, through the use of only male actors (And voice over), that only men could be interested in a computer.

And yes, you could use that argument for womens shampoo adverts - But then you'd need to remove all the male shampoo adverts too. And then how would any of us get this vital information about shampoo? Same for the Stealth Razor Bomber with forty two blades and a bluetooth speaker, and the razor that has a bit of soapy **** around the head for ladies legs.

Edit: For giggles I looked up the ASA's ruling on the advert, rather than just the news article.

Link: https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/pc-specialist-G19-1035379.html

I was going to bold some sections, but actually, I ended up bolding most of it. So. This is exactly the point I am making (Or, trying to) here:

We considered that the voice-over and fast-paced series of scenes in the ad conveyed a sense of excitement and opportunity and implied that those depicted in the ad were innovative, highly skilled and achieving excellence in the roles and careers mentioned and that those watching should aspire to excel in them too. However, the ad repeatedly cut to images of only men, who were both prominent and central to the ad’s message of opportunity and excellence across multiple desirable career paths. We therefore considered that the ad implied that excellence in those roles and fields would be seen as the preserve of men. Because of that, we considered that the ad went further than just featuring a cross-section of the advertiser’s core customer base and implied that only men could excel in those roles.

 

I fully expect to see James Charles or a similarly effete celebrity appearing in a makeup advert before the end of 2020.

 

I think it falls into taking offense for the sake of it category. If it had shown a woman mashing a keyboard with an iron, then that's reinforcing sexist stereotypes. Omitting a gender from your advert isn't inherently sexist.

 

Frankly I find the idea of any gender-based/gender-specific advert to be insulting. Even something you might think of as being pretty clear cut like tampons or pads aren't clear cut at all. Trans men who haven't had gender re-assignment surgery may still need them. I am a straight cis-gendered man and I buy pads - I don't need them myself, but there's no reason I can't pick them up for my other half. I could have done with having a hell of a lot more education in this subject without having to guess or repeatedly buy the wrong thing. But of course "ew, no, gross, periods are disgusting and icky, shame on you"...

Things like this have got nothing to do with "millennials", "snowflakes", or "outrage culture", or "political correctness", or "triggered", or "'elf and safety gawwn maaad", or whatever other ridiculous oversimplification some shitrag tabloid comes up with next. It's about recognising that, hey, you know what? These things are not OK, they are hurtful, they are insulting, they are oppressive, and they demean everyone in our society - we should absolutely stop doing them. It's generally not acceptable to use racial slurs any more but it really wasn't all that long ago that people would regularly talk about "going to the Paki shop", or "getting a Chinky take away". Jesus ****ing Christ, I still know people who think that kind of horseshit is acceptable, but generally as a society we've moved on from that kind of racially abusive language being normalised. It didn't happen because we as a society suddenly realised one day that we're actually being massive bellends, it happened because people spoke up. People spoke up and said "Hey, you know what? These things are not OK, they are hurtful, they are insulting, they are oppressive, and they demean everyone in our society - we should absolutely stop doing them."

Part of the reason there's so much toxic debate and opinions out there when it comes to gender stereotypes is because people feel threatened or are unwilling/unable to consider all sides of the debate (and let me be clear, I'm not addressing anyone here specifically in any of this post). In a wonderful demonstration of hypocrisy, often the ones who are most outraged are the same ones who will happily trot out the "snowflake" or "millennials" line under other circumstances. To those people I give some advice: don't be such a snowflake, try not to get so upset about things that don't affect you.

I haven't read the ruling in detail, I only briefly skimmed the news article earlier, but any move to stamp out more negative gender-based stereotyping in advertising is always a win in my book.

EDIT: You know what? This comment on the EG article explains the ruling far more concisely than I can:

 

I was born in the 70s and I've always gone out and got my wife pads. Both first marriage and second. I've never felt any kind of shame or embarrassment in it.

My first wife had problems with her time of the month to the point where she literally couldn't go and get them so I'd just hop in the car and oblige.

That said I was raised pretty much only by my mother. Dad died when I was 7 and yeah my mum delivered the goods so I'm very aware of female needs.

Which is why I can't stand any sort of sexism or seeing women as weak or helpless. My mother achieved what nearly all men would run away from and did her absolute best for us.

Better sex? No, but then at the same time certainly no worse.

Men can still be men. Strong men, good fathers. Again, something that many just don't understand. That's what makes a man a man to me.

 

Well, further to my comments about Pink Casino, I see a new advert by them tonight that had a man on it.

Maybe they read this thread and pooped themselves

 

Jeebus who made that ad? 80's Sega? They might as well have banned it for being crap in general.

 

https://gogirl.co.uk/ ( its safe for work btw lol )

I'm offended!
The interesting thing is that it doesnt actively say that they wont insure men. But surely this type of marketing is exactly the same as the computer Advert and needs to be removed?


Personally I think the world has gone mad and to quote Selfridge in Avatar "You know what? You throw a stick in the air around here it falls on some sacred fern, for Christ's sake!"

 

1) Geez, who are all these bleeding hearts feeling bad for marketers being told off?!

2) For everyone trotting out the same old "but there ads that discriminate against men too!" talking point: ASA complaints page is here, be the change you want to see.

 

It's not about marketers being 'told off', that's an extreme simplification although that's an element - the issue is a lot wider than that. It's the limitations placed on companies to target advertising to the demographic that most benefits their business model. I don't feel that choice represents sexism.

They're not saying that women are s**t at playing games or using computers. That advert would look like woman using computer and struggles. Man comes in, pats her head and says "there, there love. I'll do this for you" and takes over. An extremely sexist scenario, but hopefully you see where I'm coming from. The fact that they want to advertise to their largest revenue stream shouldn't have resulted in the ad being pulled.

What if they had a female in the advert but 30% of their 85% male customers were Asian with no in-ad representation? Would the same thing have happened? Genuine question.

 

That's the thing, though. This advert wasn't intended to be seen only by their customer base. It might have been a different story, IE: Not one, had that been the case but this was intended to bring in more customers, and thus, was played to a much wider audience.

It doesn't matter that it didn't show something blatently sexist - The implication is that this hobby of ours is the domain of men, and men alone. That the jobs covered are the domains of men. When they aren't. Which brings me back to the fact that we, as men, are undoubtedly more blinkered with sexism than women are. We've not had the same experience. I don't believe the majority of us see it as well as women see sexism against them.

Would it have been pulled if there was a woman and no asian bloke on grounds of racism? I don't know. I doubt it, because there wasn't exclusively white people in the advert. It'd have been less diverse had they replaced one of the non-white people with a white woman, but if that decision was made then I'd probably have some questions still.

But again, this isn't just about their customer base. If it was a video shown at an invite-only event and the only way to get in was to be a customer, then it'd definitely be about that. But since this was a TV ad broadcast to exponentially larger numbers of people than just their customer base, their customer makeup is completely irrelevant.

And let me be clear, here, I'm not saying PCSpecialist are sexist. I sincerely doubt they made the ad in house. I would question, however, what information they provided (IE: Our customers are mostly men. Make something that appeals to men.) to the company that did make the advert, and the creative decisions made by that company (IE: Not looking at the numbers I expect PCS provided (87.5% male customers, which presumably leaves up to 12.5% female) and thinking "I'll put a woman in this advert with some dudes, no one's going to do the actual math on whether 1 out of 3 or 4 is ~13%"). I'd wager it was a man in charge of the project. I'd wager that the person, or people, signing off on the advert were also mostly men.

 

I don't think their customer base is irrelevant. Over all their years of trading, 85% of all customers were male so that's where their bulk revenue comes from. It's their CHOICE to target that.

You say that this hobby of ours isn't exclusively the domain of men and men alone - and I agree wholeheartedly agree but I refer you back to the shampoo adverts or any other gender free product that exclusively advertises with females. Washing your hair with a quality shampoo for x type of hair isn't exclusively the domain of women, regardless of whether or not females are the significant market share (which they are).

 

I mean, I'd suggest that the decision to exclude one of the larger gender groups on the basis that they're (potentially) only ~13% of the customer base is in itself at least a little bit sexist.

The key difference with those shampoo adverts, though, is that they're advertising shampoo. With the best will in the world, shampoo isn't a potential career, and moreover, these people are washing their own hair. Sure, you could wash hair for money, but you better be doing it as part of a hair styling business or you're going to be very poor very quickly. I suppose you could argue the potential of a shampoo advert getting someone interested in chemistry, but I have my doubts about that. But this advert covers;

1: Computing - A potentially lucrative field, depending on what you do and how good at it you are.
2: Producing music - Again, a potentially lucrative field if you've a flair for that kind of thing
3: Coding - Potentially very lucrative, especially in the current IoT world.
4: Gaming - If you're an esports person of some repute, I'm given to understand (I saw a kid on a Big Fat Quiz show who won an assload of cash for being second in some esport thing) you can also make very good money.

And it showed only men doing these things. I, personally, didn't see that until it was pointed out. On the face of it, it looked to me like an advert about computers that only had blokes in it. I thought it was sexist purely because I know women are involved in IT. I didn't even consider the other things until I read the text of the ASA ruling and I agree with the ASA's assessment after looking at it again. That's what I mean about blinkered, by the way. I expect everyone here is aware of sexism and that it's a bad thing, but that we don't always see it because aspects of it have never occurred to us.

 

Does that really mean then that every advert out there has been properly vetted to ensure not only that it isn't openly sexist but isn't implying (even inadvertantly) something sexist.

Also, at what point does this stop? Let's say that they reshoot the advert with a white man and a black woman. Does that now imply racism by not including someone Asian? Also, there's nobody in that advert with a visible disability. Is that discriminatory too?

 

I mean.. Yeah. An advert shouldn't be allowed to cause offence. The ASA won't be able to review every single advert, there's not enough time in the day, so the onus should be put on the advert producers to make sure their advert isn't implying sexism, racism, discrimination, or any other isms or ions that need to be considered.

I can't answer that. I'm not in the advertising business, nor the advertising standards business, but I expect there has to be a reasonable limit on the basis that adverts are generally only so long. The argument could, I'm sure, be made that every advert is discriminatory in some way. It's a complex topic, not causing offence. Which is another reason I think a plain grey background and plinth with the product on it next to a list of what it does is a much better advertising rule.

The current system of complaints after the fact is.. Probably about as good as it's going to get, though. At least the ASA publishes its rulings, regardless of which way the ruling went, so it's fairly transparent.