Advertising: Score hair cream CSP

 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?
From the score advert we can see that the intention of the advert is that the hair cream will get you all the women and you will be on the top, in the advert we can see that the man is being portrayed as being superior as he also holds a gun while the women are inferior as they are carrying him and how they are in a lower position and appear to be admiring and reaching out compared to him.

2) What representations of women were found in post-war British advertising campaigns?
Women at the time were usually sexualised or objectified at the time, war adverts would somewhat empower women as they did not usually fight in the war however the adverts they would use would usually be a strong woman or telling a woman directly to help in the war.

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.
In the image I think that it shows how the cream is supposed to get you to be attractive to women as seen by the image of the man smiling and him being carried by them almost as if he is being praised by them, we can also see a sense of colonialism as they are in the jungle and their costume being of a safari theme, despite the advert being set in a jungle, the advert is a British advert for the hair cream so that links to how the British empire had started to deform during the end of the wartime. We can also see that he is carrying a gun in which connotes power and control and in this case, it may be a phallic symbol as the advert is trying to get into the sexual pleasures of men which could link to the male gaze as we can see that the women are dressed in revealing clothes compared to the man who only has his top button undone.

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

They see the man as the hero and how he is the protector of his tribe which would be the females. This would make the younger male audience more inclined to buy the product as they would want to be in the same place that the man is in.

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

I think that audiences of 1967 would find this ad acceptable as I don't think that this representation of both genders would be wrong, however, I think that audiences in the 2020s would find the advert sexist or insensitive.


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?
They use a lot of direct address towards the viewer in the slogan and in the copy, it addresses the viewer as the cream being the final product they need as if the audience was looking for something and no longer needs to look. This makes the audience more relatable to the situation they might be in or want to be in.

7) How might you apply feminist theory to the Score hair cream advert - such as van Zoonen, bell hooks or Judith Butler?
We can apply Van Zoonen's theory of how gender is constructed through contextual means, in this case, we can see that men are supposed to be dominant and strong and women are supposed to be submissive and listen to men.

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

We can apply Gauntlett's theory of how the media producer and audience is what defines gender, we can apply this as the producer will set the gender role and how it is up to the audience whether to follow or dismiss the role.

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)?
We can see in the advert it leans to the more heterosexual side as we can see the man being surrounded by women and how the gun could represent a phallic symbol.

10) How does the advert reflect Britain's colonial past - another important historical and cultural context?
We can see how the advert is set in the jungle and how it represents all the African countries they had colonised and how all of the subjects in the advert are all wearing safari clothing, this can be linked to how at the time of the advert was made it was about the time of when the British empire started to breakdown.

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'"?
They say it could be empowering the "wrong sex" and how the women are being more empowered than ever and how we are much less equipped to deal with problems that boys have.

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

They did the "successful man" in 2016 to "relieve the unrelenting pressure on them to conform to suffocating, old paradigms"


3) How does campaigner David Brockway, quoted in the article, suggest advertisers "totally reinvent gender constructs"?
He suggested that they be "more revolutionary" particularly when coming to the subject of the male body as they focus on the side of the women more than the men.

4) How have changes in family and society altered how brands are targeting their products?
In recent times there have been a plethora of different families such as same sex couples or things such as that, we can see that advertising has tried to be as fluid as possible for everyone and all families types.

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?

He talks about how all men in advertising are seen as being "attractive" and how it also affects men who do not have that type of body standard, they normalise this by saying that "being a man is about success" and how "change is for the good".