Under-representation – does advertising a product mean advertising perfection?

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As a special one-off workshop, we had a guest speaker Steve in who, for many years now, has been fighting for justice concerning the representation of disabilities within advertising. He argued that as a reported 11 million people suffer from a disability in the UK, then why shouldn’t they be positively represented in advertisements? From this, our task was to create a print advertisement for Clarks that included a disability. We had to make sure we weren’t drawing the attention away from the product and making the ad solely about the disability shown. With this guidance, we were put in small groups and then given roughly three hours to capture, edit and present our ad…

We took a lot of time contemplating and gathering ideas, with the decision of which disability to depict being the main issue. We know we had to have it visible but at the same time not obvious, so it was difficult. Despite it not feeling particularly politically correct, we were told we didn’t have to use a genuinely disabled person in the advertisement as we had limited time. With this in mind, I suggested that instead of photoshopping someone’s leg or arm off, we could put someone’s arm up their own sleeve to make it appear more realistic than just editing on its own. Where we wanted a subtle approach to the idea of disability being in a mainstream advertisement, we thought the disability should be among non-disabled peers. Similarly, we wanted the tagline and slogan to represent the brand rather than the disability, so made them have an underlying but not obvious link. The following is the advertisement me and my group produced, receiving second place out of seven groups.

The notion of equality within the media, particularly advertising, is a long debated issue. It seemed to take far too long to get to where we are now with racial representation and the media still only tends to show homosexuality in a negative light as well. With this in mind, will disability ever be shown in mainstream media in the near future? The closest we have got is programmes such as the BBC’s Britain’s Missing Top Model and, despite this being representation, it still doesn’t show equality as it’s disabled individuals surrounded by, well, other disabled people. Now this may seem a negative approach, but if they’re fighting for fair representations, then surely they want themselves represented in fair situations? Also, the BBC are obliged to produce programmes such as these because everyone with a television pays for them, so they have a duty to represent the public. Sadly, the chances of disabilities being shown in advertising are inevitably slim; advertising is about perfection and for advertisers this is key. Since a disability is not the ‘norm’ and not desired by consumers, it will not aid in selling a product so is therefore not used. As well as this, it could distract attention away from the product being promoted, which would not bode well for the companies producing them. These reasons seem trivial where human rights are concerned, but looking at it from the point of view of businesses, why would they do something if it had potential to alter and possibly harm sales? I’m sure if a disabled person owned their own business and were to launch an advertising campaign, they are unlikely to upset media conventions and risk declining sales by including disability in the advertisements. Of course in a perfect world it would be idyllic for everyone to accept disability simply as a different ‘norm’, but we seem to have the opposing negative view of disabled people being a completely different species. In situations such as these, many look to the media to blame however as I have previously stated in other posts, I feel they just perpetuate the already conceptualised reality of culture society have built.

There was recently a programme broadcasted on Channel 4 called Beauty & The Beast where they showed two individuals going into a coffee shop at different times inquiring about a job – one of the people had a facial disfigurement and one did not. The latter received more information about the job, whereas the person who had the disfigurement was turned down and denied the job completely. This is not necessarily seen as a disability to everyone, but this still shows how society continue to discriminate and how they interact with people who, essentially, oppose the ‘norm’. Obviously certain disabilities would be refused in a job that required tasks that they couldn’t do, but most just judge on first impressions and assume all disabled persons to have no physical ability at all. I feel this is unethical, disgusting and an example of blatant insolence as well as being completely illegal – it genuinely worries me how shallow society seems. And with the businesses that do employ disabled people, are they doing so because they’re good at their job? Or cynical as it is, is it more a form of tokenism to show the business in a positive light by supporting equality and keeping the law on their side?

Bibliography

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/beauty-the-beast-ugly-face-of-prejudice

http://www.bbc.co.uk/missingmodel/