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Poor Apple. First the iPad was plagued with its menstruation-esque name which some argued meant that the boardroom had been somewhat woman-free at the time the moniker was selected, and now the Huffington Post wonders whether Apple’s new iPad billboard campaign is sexist.
Allegations of sexism are a result of a series of ads on bus stops which seem to show men reading “serious” publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, while ladies be reading Nicholas Sparks novels or organizing their photo albums.
If pressed, I would have to say that I’m not convinced that Apple is being sexist here. For what it’s worth, The Huffington Post’s “quick poll” shows that over 72% of readers do not think that the ads are showing some kind of secret sexist bias.
Our very own Katie did a great article a couple weeks back on how a lot of advertising does tend to be anti-feminist, so this could perhaps be a quite subtle example of that, but it certainly doesn’t rank with Burger King’s singing/showering Burger-kini girl, a post-coital Snow White hocking beer after having just schtupped all seven dwarves (who probably all go by “Sleepy” now — zing!), voyeuristic shower bubbles or delightfully sexist vintage ads worthy of Don Draper.
Sure, it would be nice to see one of the men in the ads reading the male equivalent to Nicholas Sparks (Dan Brown, John Grisham, etc.), but like the iPad itself, at the end of the day, the ads are just sort of boring. They don’t have the cutting-edge quality of the original “shadow-dancer” ads that everyone went so crazy for a decade earlier. More importantly, the iPad still isn’t letting us know why it’s really any different than all of your other iStuff.
But what do you think – is Apple betraying its underlying corporate sexism, or is this just a benign ad campaign?
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Just like every other advertiser, they are catering to their demographic by showing men and women as they tend to be. The fact that we don’t like what works seems proof of our false impressions of ourselves, not of any sexism.
If women really were more likely to buy a product shown with a serious newspaper, don’t you think the ads would be out there?
I’ll bet they did serious demographic testing to decide what products would be shown on the reader.
Silly rabbit! Companies don’t make ads to sell products and make disgusting amounts of money. They do it to hate on womenz or the damn gays!
I’m confused by your comment, since I came to the conclusion that this was not necessarily sexist.
I was being flip. They can’t all be winners, how about a “knock knock” joke instead?
Aak. Sorry about that. I meant that to be a response to Kai — my computer’s a little messed at the moment.
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