American Airlines FAIL
Sugar Daddy's here, no need to worry about silly ole frequent flyer miles...
Reader Rebecca is a member of American Airlines' frequent flyer program, but wasn't too thrilled when she opened her inbox to find an email with this image and the tagline:
"She's thinking about dessert. You're thinking about the 1,000 American Airlines AAdvantage® bonus miles you just earned."
I guess they didn't think about the fact that some of their customers in the program might be (I know it's hard to grasp but), um, female. Yeah.
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You'd think they'd try to target their emails a little better. Send that to the men and send something else to the women. Not the smartest marketing move. When did offending a large group of your market become a good idea?
I really don't think this seems that offensive, unless they NEVER advertise using women as their customers. If a florist advertises by showing a man buy a flower for his s/o, but they also advertise showing a woman buying flowers for a friend in the hospital or something, does that mean the original ad is ONLY aimed at men? I can look at this and picture myself treating my fiance to a trip away, I don't automatically associate myself with the woman just because I am female.
I don't think its offensive either. I assumed that most of the readers of this blog would be offended; that's why I said offending a large group of the market.
I'm thinking they might have...I also get monthly statements about my frequent flyer miles from American Airlines, but I didn't receive this one. That doesn't prove anything, I know, but maybe for some reason AA thought Rebecca was a man (for some reason, I don't know)
So if it was reversed, would that be sexist?
What's wrong with a person treating their (presumed) significant other to a trip away, and not letting them worry about cost? Is this like a pattern, they NEVER advertise to women? That might be sexist. One ad, though?
But can you even imagine an ad featuring a woman feeding a berry and the tag line "He's thinking about dessert..."? I can't. I don't think I've ever seen an airline do the kind of female-targeted advertising that portrays a woman as the financial provider for a man.
for some reason, the first thing i thought of - when thinking of the role reversal (man being fed dessert - woman excited about the frequent flier miles) was 'dessert' being sex after dinner and not the cake. Maybe it's all of those old commercials and movies I've seen where the women invite the men back to their houses for 'dessert' or 'coffee'... and that type of image is just ingrained in my head.
You mean, if it were different would it be the same?
Anyway...
The ad isn't sexist because it depicts a man treating a woman to a trip. It's sexist because it ASSUMES the recipient of the email is a man! Y'know, the default sex?
If looking at the single ad alone, I would not assume that they thought I was a man. I would assume they thought I would relate to the person who cares enough about their s/o to treat them to a trip away without concerns, regardless of my gender.
My question, I guess, is why are you assuming you are expected to relate to the woman in the ad? Why aren't you assuming the man represents you? Perhaps you should analyze why you relate first on the basis of sex, and then on the pertinent characteristic-- that you are a customer, like the man.
Absolutely! I've been receiving AA emails for years, and there was NEVER an email that assumed the recipient was FEMALE. This was actually the first email I received that assumed the recipient is male. I was so angry I wrote them an outraged email, but never got a response. Guess they didn't think it was important enough to get back to me and apologize.
The ad is assuming that the audience is male and heterosexual. That is pretty much the definition of heterosexist.
Honestly, how hard would it have been for them to use gender neutral language?
"Your date is thinking about dessert. You're thinking about the 1,000 American Airlines AAdvantage® bonus miles you just earned."
Choose the right picture and you could avoid the heterosexual bias in the ad as well.
While I admit this ad campaign is sexist because there is a PATTERN of hetero male-only ads, one ad does not mean they assume their audience is all male. I see ads on TV for restaurants all the time that show women eating and laughing at the table. Does that mean that they are only advertising to women? No. What about Motrin ads that show woman talking about how Motrin cured her arthritis pain? If not for the pattern, wouldn't it be possible that they assume that you, a customer, will relate to the CUSTOMER in the ad, and then place your own significant other in the other position, instead of ASSUMING that you would take on the role of the female figure only?
There's generally been a lot of those kinds of assumptions in the travel industry, particularly around business travelers. I once wrote to US Airways about the brochure they sent to elite members of their FF program, because every single photograph of someone enjoying their deeee-luxe benefits was white and male.
I don't think it's useful to look at these photographs in isolation from one another. The question, I think, is whether or not there's a pattern, and I think the answer to that question is pretty clearly that there is.
right....it's not this ad in isolate, it's if this is a pattern. (i personally think this ad is stupid, because if i was a man taking a lovely lady on a vacation, i wouldn't want to think about my stupid frequent-flier miles, but whatever.)
when i worked in advertising, we designed ads designed to target specific demographics and sub-demographics all the time. if, say, your market research and an analysis of your sales indicates that, say, men between the ages of 35 and 50 buy the majority of plane tickets, then the agency designs ads that speak to men between the ages of 35 and 50. that's not sexism, that's common sense.
then, if you're looking to expand your market, and research shows that women are buying more and more plane tickets, then you might design another ad/campaign that targets women. again, not sexism. it's speaking to those that are most likely to hear you.
But this isn't an ad in a magazine or on tv. This is an email from a program to a person enrolled in that program. It's direct communication.
it's a MASS email to a large GROUP of people enrolled in a program, and statistically, most of those people enrolled are probably men.
there's no such thing as an ad *only* your targeted audience sees. and that's true no matter what audience you're targeting, or what medium you're using, be it print ads, direct mail, television, radio, outdoor.... advertisers are always trying to narrow the gap between "who sees" and "who they're targeting" so they can craft messaging that speaks to someone more specifically. (i think that's slightly orwellian, but that's a different issue.)
as i said before, i think it's sexist if there's a more systematic problem, looking at one ad in isolation isn't helpful. if there's evidence that women are buying more and more airline tickets, and yet american doesn't want their business so they don't advertise to them, THAT'S a problem.
another example: all the recent carl's jr. ads for their double-heart-bypass burgers feature almost exclusively men. that company, after years of crappy sales/declining market share, has decided to target the young male sub-demographic and has increased their number of larger menu items, in contrast to, say, mcdonald's, who actively goes after women, who eat more salads. is it sexist of carl's jr. to have men in their ads? i mean, women eat burgers, too. and if i show up at carl's jr. and order a burger, they'll happily serve me. but i'm statistically *less likely* to eat a burger than a salad, so they put guys in the burger commercials.
again, that's not sexism, that's common sense: find people you want to talk to, then do it the best you can.
baddesignhurts,
here's something to think about, though...
i don't know what side of advertising you work on, but i'm a designer... however, i do understand a bit of the copy end of things and one thing that is kind of blaring in this case is that, well... there's nothing to be gained from targeting just men in heterosexual relationships.
in other words, hetero men would probably (and i can guarantee you they didn't do a focus group for this email blast) not respond less favorably to an ad that said "your date" as in rhowan's suggestion above. however, at the mere price of four characters (including the space), you open up the pool of positive connections with your ad to everyone who is not a hetero man.
the photo, too, wouldn't be that hard to source. you could even maintain the hetero male targeting by have a first-person shot of feeding a woman (it took me all of 10 seconds to find about 8 such shots or shots that could be cropped to that on istockphoto).
even if 80% of the people who signed on for these updates are men and 90% of them are hetero, you're talking about diminishing the effectiveness of your ad by 28% just due to pure laziness and unconscious sexism and heterosexism.
from a marketing angle, the ad is just dumb and serves as a good example of how these isms can actually shoot the [airline in this case] in the foot... and this is all aside from the boring-airline-miles-obsessed-moron angle on how the ad insults the guys it's targeting.
puckalish, i'm a designer, too. (hence my sign-in name. :) though i did also do a lot of copywriting....i worked in a sort of multidisciplinary agency.
i can definitely see your point, and i agree the ad could certainly be better. i don't know that if by saying "your date" that all of a sudden, anyone other than a hetero man can identify better with this ad than by using the gendered pronouns because the narrative of the photo is pretty clear. again, i'm not saying the ad *isn't* sexist, i'm saying that it's hard to tell if it's sexist without examining a pattern of communications. most research has shown that consumers are increasingly immune to advertising, and so, in order to make the most of advertising dollars, companies are purposely making their ads increasingly specifically targeted. i.e., not just aiming for "women", but "women, between 25 and 35 making more than X amount per year that consume the following products and enjoy the following media". a dystopian "minority report"-style future where the ads change and call your name as you walk by is probably a lot closer than i'd like to imagine.
another weird thing: in my state, as in some others, there are actually laws stating that a company must have certain percentages of women and minorities depicted in their advertising. so a lot of these stock photos are specifically set up with hetero couples (even in scenarios in which it might seem more likely to have all men, like a bunch of friends at a baseball game or some other stereotypical male activity) because it gets a woman in the image.
Uh god, I know. I know there's not a different ad for every individual. But even if a company's main target is men, it's possible to go for the male demographic without so blatantly calling everyone reading your ad a (hetero) man.
Okay. If it is a PATTERN, then yes, it's sexist.
One ad I will not call sexist simply because people who see it seem to automatically identify not with the person who is the customer like them, but rather with the person who is the same sex as them. But if they are truly representing their clients as only white men, I can see that that is a problem.
Brianna, the problem is that it IS a pattern -- even if American isn't the worst culprit, it's buying into a decades-old cultural pattern EVERYWHERE of the assumptive male-neutral. The neutral "you," "customer," "person," "human," "passenger," "doctor," "employee," "CEO," "manager," etc. are all assumed as male. AUTOMATICALLY. You have "bosses," and then you have "female bosses." But how many times have you heard someone say, off the bat, "my male boss said such and such to me"? Taking the time to point out that someone linguistically neutral is a woman is offensive unless her being a woman is somehow *relevant* to the reason for the story you're telling. The problem is that being a woman is ALWAYS seen as relevant, because being a woman makes you "other," which is why people do this. Obviously, it ought to be that being a woman is just as relevant or irrelevant in any given situation as being a man. If you saw someone driving like a maniac and don't feel the need to point out that he's male, then you shouldn't feel the need to point out another maniac driver is female. There's tons of literature documenting this, and I'm sure if you think about it for very long, you'll see an anecdotal pattern emerge from your own experiences.
While you may have a point that it isn't technically a requirement that businesses assist in shifting cultural paradigms, their lack of a legal duty to do so -- and the fact that they're just "following the dictates of the market," which is also sexist in addition to having a whole host of other problems -- hardly makes them immune from criticism. That they are free-riding on a sexist culture doesn't make them any less culpable. It may not make them particularly MORE culpable than a whole host of contributors, but just because we're calling out this individual company should hardly be taken as a statement that this is the only company that needs to be taken to task. We're calling them out because doing so adds to the volume of the feminist dialogue we're trying to have with the world.
It is a long, arduous, occasionally boring, almost always frustrating and thankless, task. And sometimes a lot of us just won't feel like doing it, and will look at something like this and say, "God, can't we give it a rest?" Because it's just so damn TIRING to keep our eyes all the way open, all the time. And that's totally understandable, because calling this shit out every time it happens is fucking IMPOSSIBLE. But the fact that we're imperfect in recognizing and attacking sexism everywhere it shows up doesn't mean we should never do it. It just means it's gonna take way longer than it should to accomplish our goals.
I know if I got 1,000 bonus miles, I wouldn't ONLY be thinking about the bonus miles. And if my future husband got 1,000 bonus miles, he wouldn't either.
I mean, come on. The ad is assuming that only men treat women to trips across the country which is unfair to both sexes, and the ad is suggesting that you can make your lady happy because you've got 1,000 air miles to fly AND she gets dessert. Basically, women don't think about anything BUT dessert.
A WOMAN got this e-mail, assuming she was a man and had a lady-friend of some sort. Single men, single women, gay men, and lesbians possibly received this same e-mail. I wonder what their reactions were...
yes, it's really odd they didn't at least write, "he's thinking..." but "you're thinking..."
That just doesn't make sense.
Earth to American Airlines - they let women buy plane tickets now!
I don't know if anybody told you this - but women buy their own plane tickets, they have their own jobs, they don't have to get their father's or husband's permission to spend money, my word, they can even VOTE now!
So, American Airlines, take note, you have female passengers who PAY THEIR OWN AIRLINE FARE - so they worry about their frequent flyer miles too!
Guess ya didn't know that!
seems they're insulting men with this...
She's enjoying the moment, the intimate time with her man and delicious strawberries and his mind's on his airline miles? She needs to ditch this guy.
I'd complain about this article but I'm a woman and there's a cake nearby. Mmmm. Cake.
Win.
I am a member and received that email. The message I perceived is being dependent on a man to earn miles. I am capable of earning my own miles and getting my own dessert. Or I could buy dessert for my man with my miles! I agree, poor marketing. American has gone down, IMO.
See? This is why American society is down the tubes today, friends. Women trying to take away the natural distinctiveness of male and female. Women insisting, 'anything he can do, I can do better, and he'd better not try.' Women who flush with anger when a man, in his role as provider, opens a door for her or takes her on a nice trip to Hawaii. Women who become angry when faced with evidence of their own undeniable biological differences from men
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CHIVALRY, AMERICA?
::starts and emerges from trance::
Oh, sorry. Sometimes I channel the right-wing "social conservatives" I deal with every day. Carry on.
just read about Samhita's apology for Lovelle Mixon's rape and murder at FemiSex and I must say, wow, how can a site that says it is ok for a man to rape and kill so long as he's black and pissed off, how can they really purport to care if a lady is thinking about desert.
Rock On and Rape on Lovelle, the Feministing women will cry big tears for you. Heads up to Feminising: THRERE IS NO GOOD EXCUSE TO RAPE. This site has denigrated into something far far away from feminism. Support Obama over Hillary and now support RAPE as long as there's a darn good reason? excuse me while i run to the bathroom and toss my lunch!
sadie101,
have you ever heard of relevance? how about posting on the thread you're so pissed off about.
or how about reading it? because in both posts, Samhita was really clear that it is not okay for a man to rape and kill, no matter what. would you like me to quote her or should i just let Vanessa know to delete your off-topic nonsense? how about both?
In the words of Samhita:
So, yeah, how about reading what Samhita actually had to say before jumping to judgment. I dare say, you might learn something (how scary)! Mind you, Samhita's gotten a fair amount of hate mail, name-calling and so forth, not to mention the sorts of racist crap that came up in some comments (such as that black men don't respect authority and that's why police beat them). You're not the first and you certainly won't be the last, but you can take a moment and try to read the actual posts Samhita made and understand them. They're not about condoning violence - they're about preventing violence. But, hey, that would require understand your own complicity in a violent system - and that might make you feel like you have some responsibility to try to change that system. It's much easier to see Mixon as a "bad guy" with no context and get real comfortable with the fact that your life has nothing at all to do with his.
sadie101:
It might good to check out our comments policy, specifically regarding derailing threads. This is a warning.
Thanks, puck.
I noted that Samhita threatened to delete someone for disagreeing with her. My goodness this seems a bit hysterical. (other posters noted that on the story that Samhita posted that I referred to.) I see it as relevant to point out a site's conflicting stance on women's issues. But I will slink away quietly, yet I must say the whole of the site must be taken into account when I post. Slate, for example, must be heavily dicounted on their XX factor because of the prior sexist posts. Jus saying...
bye.
Dismissing a woman's stance on something as being 'hysterical'?
Now where have I seen that used before?
This ad is offensive because of the DEFAULT assumption. 1) Only men spend enough money to get this many air miles and 2) Only women would get money lavished on them.
The default assumption is always the enemy.
I'm the Rebecca that sent this in (thanks for posting!). I'm really surprised that some of you don't see the sexism. Even based on this one e-mail, it's pretty clear to me.
It's the "She's thinking... . You're thinking..." part that does it. They pair this with a picture of a man and a woman. The "you" here is obviously the man. The man is paying for the dessert, thinking manly thoughts about frequent flyer miles, etc. The woman is thinking "Hooray for fruit!" or something, I guess (not that that's a bad thought, fruit is delicious).
It plays on so many classic themes of sexism: men are the default customer, men pay for their dates, men think about "important" things (like business and travel), women think about "frivolous" things (like how dessert is totally awesome), etc.
(I did check to see whether AA had some reason to think I was male. When I login it says "Ms." not "Mr.", so that would be a no.)
I don't see what all the hullabaloo is about. It's an ad. Yes its biased and uses incorrect language, but what good does focusing on an add do when there are so many more important things to discuss? The glass ceiling gets my blood pumping, the treatment of women in certain male dominated occupations is outrageous, the arguments against abortion that disproportionately affect poor people but this? This add is a pimple and I don't stress over pimples when a shark is eating my entire arm.
Why do people on here always have to pull this argument out?
"Don't we have more important things to worry about?"
To be blunt, No. Some people have a limited amount of time to focus where to put their energy in terms of fighting sexism within the context of kariarchy. So something that you're dismissing as frivilous (oh, the pursuits of women...)is the nitty gritty hard stuff for someone else. So should we all fight the same issues as you?
I grew up poor, so a big fight in my life is the reformation of social systems. But let's say you grew up middle-class. My fight might not be a concern for you, and I refuse to be dismissive of your choices because you focus your energy on another pursuit (This is merely a for-instance, not a presumption about the kind of life you might have/be liv[ing]).
But at the end of the day, sexist advertising is a symptom of a brutal system and pointing out the everyday and mundane examples that inundate our lives opens up space for dialogue, critical thought and the chance to make small changes. Something like this might change the demographic targeting approach of *one* copyist/designer/publisher/et al... and who can tell how far that ripple could spread? So to me, that's worth all the energy and the fuss. Making change in small ways is just as worthwhile as smashing the patriarchy with a hammer. So I'd appreciate if people would stop being dismissive over feminists "sweating the small stuff" and "derailing the movement" or whatever...
Sorry, perhaps I should have phrased that better. In a sense I get where you're coming from but I am of the opinion that if we can and do change the big things the small things will change as well. Sorry if I offended.