Blog task: Score advert and wider reading

 Complete the following tasks and wider reading on the Score hair cream advert and masculinity in advertising.

Media Factsheet - Score hair cream

Go to our Media Factsheet archive on the Media Shared drive and open Factsheet #188: Close Study Product - Advertising - Score. Our Media Factsheet archive is on the Media Shared drive: M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets. If you need to access this from home you can download it here if you use your Greenford login details to access Google Drive.

Read the factsheet and answer the following questions:

1) How did advertising techniques change in the 1960s and how does the Score advert reflect this change?

Advertising agencies in the 1960s relied less on market research and leaned more toward creative instinct in planning their campaigns. “Eschewing portrayals of elitism, authoritarianism, reverence for institutions and other traditional beliefs, ads attempted to win over consumers with humour, candour and, above all, irony.” The score advert demonstrates this through its patriarchal depiction of the man as being superior and dominant over the women in the advert while also reinforcing the contemporary beliefs of the time about colonisation and presenting it as a 'manly' and socially accepted portrayal of a man to be hunting and carried around in a foreign land.

2) What representations of women were found in post-war British advertising campaigns?

In the UK, advertising in the post-war period was characterised by campaigns that very effectively reinforced that idea that a woman’s place was in the home. Ironically, during the Second World War, propaganda posters had convinced women that their place was on farms and in factories while the men were away fighting. Post-war, and now surplus to requirement in the workplace, the advertising industry stepped in to provide a new ‘propaganda’ campaign – one designed to make women feel useful in the domestic arena.  In the 1950s it was often a male expert who lectured to women about the virtues of a product. This changed in the 1960s: the male expert replaced by a female in a kitchen regularly extoling the virtues of a new soap powder to another female. ‘The Good Wife’ – often portrayed as something of a ‘bimbo’ - was the most common representation of women in 1960s advertising, who serviced the needs of her family and took pride and joy in housework. By 1967 it would not be uncommon to view females as both subservient to men and wearing very little clothing Men were represented exclusively as the breadwinner and – more often than not - intellectually superior to their female spouses. The woman’s role was to support the man in his efforts.

3) Conduct your own semiotic analysis of the Score hair cream advert: What are the connotations of the mise-en-scene in the image? You may wish to link this to relevant contexts too.

The phallic symbol that is presented through the gun can inferred as being something to draw in males who are hyper fixated with masculinity and will associate the product with being more attractive. Furthermore the use of short clothing makes the women seem much more provocative and maybe even sexualised to an extent which can be clearly inferred as a way to suggest to men that like the slogan of the advert you 'can get anything you've ever wanted' suggesting that many women will want you if you use the hair cream. in the centre of the image we can also see how the man is in the centre showing he is the most important with women around him

4) What does the factsheet suggest in terms of a narrative analysis of the Score hair cream advert?

The Score advert identifies the man as Propp’s ‘hero’ in this narrative. The image infers that he is ‘exulted’ as the hunter-protector of his ‘tribe’. The adoration, and availability, of the females are his reward for such masculine endeavours. The idea of women being sexually available and falling at the feet of a man is echoed in the long running series of Lynx deodorant commercials that ran for the greater part of the early twentieth century. Even though many decades separate the Score and Lynx commercials, their message, despite changes in social attitudes, is remarkable similar. There is clearly much truth in the mantra that sex sells.

5) How might an audience have responded to the advert in 1967? What about in the 2020s?

The 1967 male audience might read the narrative as ironic and humorous (the dominant reading?) but it is unlikely that they would challenge the underlying ideology implicit within the advert. Females, though not the target audience, might read the gender representations in an oppositional way but at the same time accept its representation of a patriarchal society as normal or inevitable. Modern audiences, including students of the media, are likely to respond in a different way, aware that its sexist narrative is outdated and, for some, offensive.

6) How does the Score hair cream advert use persuasive techniques (e.g. anchorage text, slogan, product information) to sell the product to an audience?

The persuasive techniques used in the advert and issues surrounding brand values, brand message, brand personality and brand positioning should inform the analysis. The Liquid hair tonic is a product of the American Bristol-Meyers Company. Like many large companies of this era, they paid much more attention to building a distinctive character for the brand. The brand message is clear: to present the product as grooming product for a ‘real’ (masculine) man. The choice of the ‘Score’ brand name is deliberate and carries very obvious connotations. It draws in men with the promise of having an easier time with grooming and being the man they are supposed to be while the name of the product 'score' connotes scoring points or the winning of something like the attention of all the females around you.

7) How might you apply feminist theory to the Score hair cream advert - such as van Zoonen, bell hooks or Judith Butler?

Judith Butler asserts that gender is not biologically determined but rather socially determined; learned through society. She believes that gender is a performance. Both the male and the female in the Score advert are performing the roles of the (masculine) man and the (feminine) woman in accordance with their biological sex. The advert also serves to reinforce the binary opposite gender roles ascribed by society.

bell hooks is a feminist writer and social activist who has explored the intersectionality of race, social class and gender issues. Regarding feminist theory as a historically middle class concern, her contemporary perspective identifies a kind of double or triple oppression of women who are also black and/or working class. She also advocates that feminism should be seen as the struggle to end patriarchal oppression and the ideology of domination (and that men need to participate in this process). Indeed hooks uses term ‘white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy’ to describe all the oppressive factors in our society. This might aptly describe the image presented in the Score advert.

8) How could David Gauntlett's theory regarding gender identity be applied to the Score hair cream advert?

David Gauntlett argues that both media producers and audiences play a role in constructing identities. The role of the producer in shaping ideas about masculinity is clear in the Score advert, which is undoubtedly similar to countless other media texts of that era. Surrounded by such representations, 1960s men would inevitably use these to shape their own identities and their sense of what it means to be a man in the mid-twentieth century. Similarly, women would have a clear sense about their place in the world, despite many of the social changes that were leading to greater equality both socially and sexually.

9) What representation of sexuality can be found in the advert and why might this link to the 1967 decriminalisation of homosexuality (historical and cultural context)?

The score advert presents a representation that is quite binary and quite apparently targeted for men who are straight rather than homosexual due to the heavy presence of provocative women and the clear depiction of the men being happy due to this. This lack of representation links to the time around the decriminalisation of homosexuality as it did not completely make it socially acceptable. 

10) How does the advert reflect Britain's colonial past - another important historical and cultural context?

Paul Gilroy argues that despite the passing of empire, the white western world still exerts its dominance through cultural products. In Hollywood film, for example, the white male (usually American) plays the role of the hero, who inevitably saves the (dependent) world from disaster. The Score advert follows a similar narrative. The jungle setting, the gun, the throne all infer that the white western male has been successful in fighting off primitives or dangerous animals to save his own tribe. 

Wider reading-  The Drum: This Boy Can article

Read this article from The Drum magazine on gender and the new masculinity. If the Drum website is blocked, you can find the text of the article here. Think about how the issues raised in this article link to our Score hair cream advert CSP and then answer the following questions:

1) Why does the writer suggest that we may face a "growing 'boy crisis'"?

We are much less equipped to talk about the issues affecting boys. There’s an unconscious bias that males should simply ‘man up’ and deal with any crisis of confidence themselves. After all, men (certainly white, middle-class, Western men) are better paid, have more opportunities and are not inhumanely oppressed in some parts of the world. Yet, the reality is that men commit suicide more than women, and are more likely to drop out of education and get involved in crime, drugs and binge-drinking. Moreover, as women are increasingly empowered, many men feel increasingly disempowered, accentuating these social problems.

2) How has the Axe/Lynx brand changed its marketing to present a different representation of masculinity?

As Lynx/Axe found when it undertook a large-scale research project into modern male identity, men are craving a more diverse definition of what it means to be a ‘successful’ man in 2016, and to relieve the unrelenting pressure on them to conform to suffocating, old paradigms. This insight led to the step-change ‘Find Your Magic’ campaign from the former bad-boy brand. One of the sectors most impacted by this insight is FMCG because the weekly shop is one of the household traditions where gender roles are most challenged; the person who wins the bread and the person who buys the bread isn’t down to gender these days.

3) How does campaigner David Brockway, quoted in the article, suggest advertisers "totally reinvent gender constructs"?

Brockway advocates that advertisers “totally reinvent gender constructs” and dare to paint a world where boys like pink, don’t like going out and getting dirty, or aren’t career ambitious, for example.

4) How have changes in family and society altered how brands are targeting their products?

As Miller says, the definition of “family” in places like Britain is profoundly changing – but advertising is not helping to normalise different scenarios by largely failing to portray this new normal. Joey Whincup, insight director at Creative Race, agrees that success comes down to better research and she’s witnessing a slow but growing shift towards targeting consumers on more than the usual ‘ABC1 male’ demographics. Quite a few brands still segment like this, but others are seeking “a true understanding of their target consumer; who they really are, their beliefs, their attitudes, where they are now, where they want to be in future. “These brands are not just governed by the jobs men do or their age”.

5) Why does Fernando Desouches, Axe/Lynx global brand development director, say you've got to "set the platform" before you explode the myth of masculinity?

Fernando Desouches, Axe global brand development director, he knows that. And, as he says, you’ve got to “set the platform” before you explode the myth. “This is just the beginning. The slap in the face to say ‘this is masculinity’. All these guys [in the ad] are attractive. Now we have our platform and our point of view, we can break the man-b***** and show it doesn’t matter who you want to be, just express yourself and we will support that. “What being a man means, and what ‘success’ means, is changing and this change is for the good. The message hasn’t exploded yet but we will make it explode. We will democratise it.” Its because he argues that men are more emotional than women and that they need to be empowered as they do not know how sick they are and the support that they are currently in need of.