Social media engagement strategies and effects

¶ … super bowl commercials that came out this year and how they targeted different genders. It discusses the role of social media like twitter and websites in speaking out against these ads and criticizing them. The paper lays emphasis on how many companies target certain genders or stereotypes and eventually go on to incur a lot of damage due to the inappropriate advertisements.

The Go daddy commercial was yet another sexist addition to the super bowl line of commercials. Even though the add did manage to get the domain name a lot of business the next day, over all the company incurred a loss of more than seven million dollars for making the commercial (Grinberg, 2013) Surely enough, everyone is used to seeing the sexist commercials every now and then. Sexism and objectifying women has long been used as a media tactic. Apart from objectifying women, gender stereotyping and allotting certain roles to the male and female gender has also been used to target a certain class of consumers. Things are changing as people are getting to post their say and how they feel about this disgusting form of advertisements.

The companies that go on to make these commercials do not look at the statistics in hand but rather dwell on the thought processes that have been out there since a long time. Companies like big daddy still believe that women can never be smart enough to computer programmers and computer programmers on the other hand can only be very geeky and over weight as well. Using the hash tag #notbuyingit, which is a social activist twitter forum, more than 8 million people spoke out against the sexist ads that are quite prevalent these days. Missrepresentation.com is the domain name that through #notbuyingit presents its message to the multimillion store Harrods for having stereotypical books in their children section.

The main idea of this entire scheme was to speak out against biasing against boys and girls. Let alone consumer advertisements, this disgusting tactic had even reached out to books present in the reading section. Tweets went out against the store using pictures of the books found there. Major emphasis was laid on books for girls that specifically targeting being fashionable and pretty. The book had a picture of an animated girl on it and was pink. On the other hand, there was another book that said is clever and it was specified only for boys. Using twitter and this hash tag, many of the social activists took pictures and posted about the two non-gender neutral books about a hundred times. The store had recently launched its gender neutral toy department only last year in August. The 15-year-old department store was re designed with a big budget and wanted to a launch a new era of purchasing toys. Out of all the times that the store had in the toys department, twitter posters made sure that the entire world got to know about the two items that were still not neutral when it comes to gender. These posts created a huge deal for Harrods and thus made quite an impact on the marketing and general outlook of the store. (London, 2013) This goes onto show that something so hidden and not projected to an entire nation can still be corrected if projected in the right way. The reports kept on growing and eventually Harrods had to apologize for the books that were present in the store.

This was an example of the extent to which media followers and fans can have on a company. The tweet that spoke against the Go Daddy adds in the super bowl reached out to about eight million people. (Grinberg, 2013) These add went on to create controversy and damage the Go Daddy domain on the day of the super bowl. However, a story published the net day stated that the domain provider achieved its biggest sales after its Super Bowl campaign. (Grinberg, 2013)

Gould went on to suggest that influencers are majorly dependent on scattering content vastly and then attaining supporters. Many a times, open communication goes onto form contextualized or temporary connections. Some of these connections actually become relationships that last longer. (Jenkins, 2013, 82 ) In simpler terms, #notbuyingit probably started out about a single add that objectified women or was stereotyping, and eventually it grew into an entire network of people speaking against the biased add agency.

Jenkins also went on to state that the marketing agencies need to stop the targeting or the mommy bloggers. Not only does this specify a certain product for a certain age group or a gender in particular. If the producers or the advertisers just go on to target just one class, it is skipping out on the one-to-many mindset. Here it just shares a message to a certain people; it doesn't let the message or the idea across to the people. If a certain add isn't stereotyped, it is allowed to develop and possibly make a bigger impact than it normally would. (Jenkins, 2013 82)

It really does seem odd and stupid for the companies to spend millions of dollars to create commercials that are gender biased. The advertisements that go on to target women, gender roles and feminine ways aren't something that will get the companies the big bucks that they need. Surely, super bowl might have been something only confined to men and boys. People who designed these commercials should realize that that the percentage of women views is nearly about fifty percent of the viewers watching the game. Apart from that, women are the one that go on to control consumer spending. Women go on to control about 65 to 85% of consumer spending. With statistics like these, it only seems absurd to go on to create ads that not only target women but might as well go on to anger them as well.