Media has a very powerful impact on the society of today. That is why media creators have to think precisely about what they want to achieve before they deliver something to the public. One of these main things media creators have to think about: Representation.
Representation is how the media deal with gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual orientation. These are often used in order to attract a certain target of people to their product as they feel represented on the media shown to them. However, society can create conflicts on representation due to their cultural beliefs. Some concurrent topics of debate in representation can be under-representation, over-representation, or negative representation. Here are examples representations in ads of big companies:
H&M
The H&M ad shows a variety of models of different sizes, ages, genders, sexualities, religions, races, and ethnicities. These models are shown wearing and doing that can be thought of as "taboo." Moreover, a voice narrates certain styles of fashion that become contradicting to the shown model. For example, as he says "dress like a man" they show a woman in a man's clothes.
This ad does not incite any kind of conflict or debate, instead, they "Close The Loop" on any hate of under-representation as they show all kinds of people. It was very well executed as it can appeal to a variety of groups and people. It also got its message clearly across the video. The "Close The Loop" campaign was about recycling clothes you did not need anymore, "recycling one single Tshirt can save 555 gallons of water." And the video was the perfect way to get that point across. It does not matter if a woman recycled that shirt, if a man likes it, then he is more than welcome to get it and enjoy it.
Not only do they show all variety of people they also incite for more people to break social fashion rules, just like they say in the video "there are no rules in fashion." They want people to break free from the "what others might think" and just behave and dress in the way it makes them happy.
Tide
In the ad, the audience sees a mother who is "pink-obsessed." This shows a cliché cultural belief that "girls only like the color pink." On the other hand, her daughter wears hoodies and cargo shorts. The mother would like for her daughter to be like her and be more "girly." She later states that one time her daughter's hoodie got a crayon stain, and she hoped her hoodie would be ruined forever so that she would dress just like her mom. But, when she cleaned it with Tide, the hoodie was fine.
The ad is supposed to represent how Tide can clean anything. But again, there is this cliché idea that girls have to behave like girls, therefore they have to like the color pink, princesses and things like that. This ad supports a negative representation or stereotype, and becomes a bad role model to other girls. They are told that they have to act like other girls. While in reality, they should be able to behave and like what they want. If they like cargo shorts instead of dresses, that should be totally fine. They should not allow any other person to tell them what they should like or not.
That is the main reason why this ad incites debate, the mother tries to change her daughter's liking, going so far as to even hoping to damage her clothes. And, that is not right, every person likes different things, and they have to be proud of what they like and should not let any other person change their mind.
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