2019 advertising industry highlights

I wonder about that exercise bike, upscale as it were, and the ad that’s claimed as sexist, and… after watching it finally… hm… Sure, whatever… guy gives girlfriend bike, she apparently uses it daily, and at the end he sits by smugly as she beams about it.  Imagine that as she’s staying trim, he’s just eating all the junk food in the house, or something… I think that’s the narrative working everyone has on this one.
It’s interesting because  I had seen a different ad before that one… which is more dystopian than any “ismist”, and thought maybe that the ad in question was a slight working of that one — which would make it more defendable — one having a man before the crack of dawn listening to an dis-embodied face task mastering him to pedal harder, back out to see a city with lights on showing everyone listening to the dis-embodied face telling everyone to pedal, damnedit, and now it’s 1984 and all that… the other a woman, the problem of the patriarchy coming in that it’s a stern man whipping everyone into shape, with the added problem being that if they switched it to a woman — that’d just count as the shrill concept.
In the meantime, the question of consumer culture that always bugs me — if it’s the bike you want, and you find the ad offensive, shouldn’t you just buy the bike anyway — are you buying the bike or the advertisement with these things?

In other great news of advertising… Ad week had a big shindig with great symposiums of bring gender equity in the advertising industry — apparently beginning with a performance from TLC (though, one of the letters passed away, so now it’s just TC, isn’t it?) — and ending with Pitbull dancing about with women wearing not much clothing shoving their butts in the air.  Were the performers paid well, with good working conditions?  Maybe that’s all that matters.

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