We shouldn’t just copy all our concepts from the West and paste them for African consumption
advertising
Posted inGeneral
For the anally correct and the politically retentive
To my impish mind the human bottom with its neat, vulnerable, curved groove looks like a huge smile. Think of the proverbial plumber in his too tight jeans, on his knees sweating over a drain pipe: he always has a smile from behind, sometimes a little hairy. Half-exposed bottoms cause giggles and bring us down […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Zapiro, monkeys and red herrings
Editorial cartooning must be one of the most difficult jobs out there. Not only must the cartoonist be technically adept when it comes to caricature, he or she also has to find the humour in situations that often, on the surface, aren’t especially funny. Day in and day out, cartoonists have to generate ideas and […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media
The fragmented bodies of consumerism
The advertising industry seemed to be working really hard to get the consumer’s attention this festive season. A few ads caught my eye — for the wrong reasons. While browsing at Stuttafords I was confronted with an image of a woman’s legs while the rest of her body formed the shape of a Christmas tree […]
Posted inEquality, Media
The Mazda CX-3 advert — slick, stylish and sadly sexist
Have you seen Mazda’s latest advert for their new CX-3 model? It’s an animated production that the company describes as “telling a true African fairytale story”. It begins at the scene of a beautiful wedding. A beautiful bride-to-be, Thandi, approaches her traditionally and somewhat royally dressed groom. But, something is wrong. She cries tearfully indicating […]
Posted inEquality, Media
A big, fat, Mzansi advertising migraine
Advertising has a way of carrying our collective cultural fantasies in nifty little 30-second bites on television and single-page print adverts in newspaper or magazines, which seem, at first, harmless and fun until, of course, they begin to illuminate the forces that inform the images we see and the consequenses of those images to our […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence
Like every other day of my life, this morning I woke up female
Once I was a girl, then I was somewhere in between, and now I am an adult woman. What that means for me is not the same as it is for other women. We can know our similarities and differences, but we cannot know any other life as intimately and honestly as we know our […]
Posted inBusiness, Health, Media
How is alcohol good for you?
I recently tweeted my views on the proposed ban on alcohol advertising. The ban, which I fully support, would see to it that alcohol no longer makes its regular appearance across multiple media channels. That means no more beer ads during a sports game. No more of those cider ads featuring hip-looking youth traversing the […]
Posted inBusiness, Media
Micro-marketing: New opiate of the masses
By Rifqah Luzita Naidoo The trends of consumer culture have most certainly evolved since the late 1940s, where critics considered people as being given superficial morals through the mass media. On the one hand technology has brought things closer; we have the world wide web, online shopping and an application for everything under the sun. […]
Posted inGeneral, Health
The cult of the toned female body
When Gilles Deleuze claimed that what Foucault had theorised as the panoptical, carceral society of disciplined, docile bodies — economically productive and politically impotent — had come to an end more or less with the Second World War, to be incrementally replaced by “societies of control”, he would probably not have been able to anticipate […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
ANC and FNB, my new favourite soapie
I have been following the soap opera between the ANC and FNB with interest and more than a little cynicism. The reaction in the aftermath too has been very intriguing. It seems that some banks are determined to be involved in matters which make me wonder if they really are banks or wannabe retailers, politicians, […]
Posted inBusiness, Gender violence
Banking on sexism
Earlier this year I told Standard Bank that they could stick their dishwasher where the sun doesn’t shine. The reason? It replicated 1950s sexism assuming that men in the family are breadwinners, sit around watching TV all day, and that the women in the family do all the cleaning. Accordingly men were given the opportunity […]